CLICKS

 Sometimes you can concentrate on something so closely that the thing or the idea becomes abstract, blurred or jagged at the edges, a layering of form and sound that makes for a crowded, frame busting tableau. "It Takes Particular Clicks" by the adroit and terse Christian Wiman makes me thing of a walk through a familiar set of scenes that are closely observed but briefly referenced, suggesting something of the narrative stream technique Virginia Woolfe employed in her novels Mrs.Dollaway or To The Lighthouse (among others),There is something odd and detached here that makes me thing of someone floating through an experience, as with Woolfe's prose at it's most sensory rich, Wiman's poem skips and jumps, highlights and moves on to other details. Woolfe, though, awarded her readers with a flood of associations, the world of hard substance negotiating terms with a mind attempting to frame and contextualize the minute particles of the everyday;It is an impressionistic undertaking here, and the way things seem to be as one passes them can be influenced by any one of many moods one experiences in a short order. Fine, I think, but what's splendid of your review is your attention to Christian Wiman's creation of sound; this poem has a soundtrack of clicks, scrapes that underscore a psychological restlessness that narrator/dog walker finds himself in. This is a noisy poem about a brief visit to a noisy world, and you've done a nice job assembling your examples. Good criticism here..Wiman's poem is more a fast , hard rain in spring. The briefness livens the nerve endings.

Flip-flops, leash-clinks,
spit on the concrete
like a light slap:
our dawn goon
ambles past, flexing
his pit bull. And soft,
and soon, a low burn
lights the flight path
from O'Hare,
slowly the sky
a roaring flue
to heaven
slowly shut.

This is a poetic situation captured in compressed essence, not enlarged, glorified, vulgarized, made philosophical, but presented instead with a flash-card alacrity Sounds against a sidewalk soon rise above as would a responding lift to note air traffic and the sky that is several tones of cloud-coded atmosphere.

At first reading they seem a jumble of incomplete thoughts, but you've gotten the sense that this is a poem of a mind in full stride through a familiar terrain. Perhaps a bit like the scenery that rushes by a passenger window, the recognition of details nesscarily conflate and color each other in succession, but there is a coherence here; noises, distractions, from planes to speed bumps and the seem to make the walk a peril for our narrator, who seems constantly to be catching with himself ; the onslaught of images and their contextual framing seems constant work. The dog he's walking, though, is unperturbed and is determined by instinct to locate what it's senses have locked on. The shape and meaning of the world changes with each step, but a dog remains a dog and will do what dogs do during walks on neighborhood streets, and in so doing brings a focus to the onslaught, provides the reason to stop, reassemble one's rattled senses and make a statement about the experience: Good girl.

There is a pull of many things on one's attention, and the effort to recognize, categorize, acknowledge the information from a familiar neighborhood walk goes efficiently, the things themselves in curt terms, associations hinted at, suggested, the walker moving along, persistent in their path.

Here's a curse

for a car door
stuck for the umpteenth
time, here a rake
for next door's nut
to claw and claw
at nothing. My nature
is to make
of the speedbump
scraping the speeder's
undercarriage,
and the om
of traffic, and somewhere
the helicopter
hovering over
snarls—a kind
of clockwork
from which all things
seek release,
but it takes
particular clicks
to pique my poodle's
interest, naming
with her nose's
particular quiver
the unseeable
unsayable
squirrel. Good girl.

This string of scenarios unfold quickly, in steady stride, and there is an attending narrative for each thing and a cogent linking between the very different items of speed bumps or the odd thing his dog uncovered during the time on the leash, very little of it explicable , but all of it coherent; this has the eliding sway of a narrative with small notes, cryptic asides. Not as cinematic as John Ashbery's associations have been, but that, I think, is the strength of the poem; Wiman minimizes rhetorical intricacy, concocts a shorthand which suggests unsaid pleasures or private disgusts, and creates in doing a collage of signifiers, the smallish incidents and contents made extraordinary in their banality. This is something akin to the old Modernist's decree that language be treated not as the audible sighs of a wise God speaking directly to us, but instead as a hard, malleable thing; Wiman's style has the mashed together beauty of junk sculpture, the condition of things that were formerly utilitarian and explicable in design and purpose but now, mashed together, cogs, gears, fenders, trash compactors and steak knives pressurized into a furious, creviced cube, approach an organic unity.

TWO POEMS

Back not so many years ago Slate had former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky work as their poetry editor, a task where he would post a weekly offering from a contemporary  writer and then lightly guide an online conversation about  the most recent offered for review. Believe  me, the conversations were intense, impassioned, sarcastic, hilarious, erudite, anything but genteel and reserved. Geniuses, liars, fools and true believers joined the contretemps that resulted with each week's poems, which is to say that one could rarely guess what sort of poem Mr. Pinsky would post that week. His selections were eclectic, and what we have here, in this post , are my responses to two particular pieces that set my fingers moving,  let us say, in respective opposite directions.

 "Riding Westward"  by  Carl Phillips is an extraordinarily good poem for most of its length, a knowing evisceration of a venerable American icon, a myth stripped of it's power and portent , with nothing left but dress, mannerism, the regrettable slush pile of  cliche    ;

Compromise his very own shoot-'em-up

tilt to the brim of his hat self, smirk to match,

all-for-love-if-it's-gotta-come-to-that half

swagger,

half unintentional, I think, sashay. 

Phillips reads as if he's hung around a few country and western bars and had gotten fairly tired of seeing an endless stream of gas-station buckaroos strut and preen their big hat up and down too many sawdust and spit covered floors to put up with it anymore. But this poem becomes a ghost story of sorts, an observation of what's left on earth after the power of particular symbols cease of have any real, practical force:  

The silver spurs at his ankles where maybe

the wings would be, if the gods still existed,

catch the light, lose it, as he stands in place,

scraping the dirt with his boots: lines, circles

that stop short, shapes that mean nothing—

no bull, not like that, but scraping shyly, like

a man who's forgotten that part of himself,

keeps forgetting, because what the fuck?

What's left is all mannerism, gesture, cults that consist essentially of dress up parties among  those in later decades who rummage through the past trying to find or at least construct a useful set of props and stylistic tics with which they can create an identity and hence a purpose. Yet the hats, the boots, the song he sings bemoaning an idealized loneliness under red Western sunsets are iconic and empty; nothing of this comes from the need to survive, but rather the need to belong to something with a fixed certainty.  This is an interesting poem to contrast and compare against Ed Dorn's epic poem "Gunslinger", where the poet reconfigures a series of Western icons into a search for some real matter and meaning beyond what mere language can manage with it's crippling dualisms; it's an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorn's narrating inquiry into the nature of the search. 

Phillips takes in the same set of aggregated props and conventional wisdom and sees instead the gaping emptiness beyond the heady glee of being dressed up in the spare vocabulary of personal codes and principled ruggedness. It's all empty and bankrupt, a story we tell to keep the darkness away. Phillips hints at something more profound than the cosmic silliness he sees with the strutting, posing and atonal warbling of prairie songs: our costumes represent nothing but wishful thinking , and that such thinking is the closet we stand to being transported to a serene, transcendent place. The gods have died, Phillips states, and we are left with our lives to either accomplish something real, or to wander about deluded, reduced by stereotypical narratives of individuality.

-----------------------------------------------

It might be said that was impossible to make anger a boring subject for a poem until Aliki Barnstone tried her hand at it. "Anger", Robert Pinsky's selection for the week, is set in situation a good many --too many-- of us recognize as awkward, strained, thoroughly unpleasant, a dinner for two who, sitting presumably at opposite ends of the table as they cut and chew their food with controlled strokes and grinding, manage a language in which they put each other on trial. Each has a turn to outline their argument , to make their case, the casing of civility chipping away with every stroke of knife and stab of fork: 

Yet we sit together at the table, each to serve

the other artfully poisoned morsels, point a fork,

and go on and on, watching the widening distance.

This would work, perhaps,if this were a fresher take on a soured relationship, but the poem treads territory that is too familiar, and Barnstone's greatest mistake here is over writing the scenario her template provides. The poem reads like a set up for a knockout punch that does not materialize from the corner she's trying to fight her way out of. It goes on too long, and the device of comparing this meal and its discontents to a trial is less a metaphor than a reason to write further , to add stanzas. 

You say, "You should have listened to me,"

and, "But you had to be you, didn't you?"

Then I become the witness who testifies against me.

We deliberate all night, inventing counterpoints,

narrowing our vision at spears of candlelight

and we go on and on, watching from a distance,

as we appeal, go back to discovery, retry, seek

sympathy by recounting suffering and history,

though this defense may deliver the verdict against us: 

The prosecutable element would have worked if it were brief, even fleeting, and if it were a means to segue into something else about the world this couple thought they were living in contrasted the world they now perceive as they relationship, presumably, slowly grinds to a stop. Barnstone might have managed something genuinely poetic if there were a sign , in images, of how the reality has changed. Rather, "Anger" reads as if Barnstone were too fascinated with the mechanics of making her -trial conceit work; the poem is damaged by repetition, needless volume. It is a mistake of perception, the assumption that the length of a piece is a measure of it's value. This length equals a long wait in a doctor's office.Grating as well is the last stanza, where Barnstone's woman character, the "I" narrator, has a failure of nerve and instead wallows in the misery she and her husband/boyfriend make for each other:

our embrace will pull us down

through the shades, and we'll hold on to our grievances

and go on, too watchful, unable to get some distance,

reading and helplessly rereading the sentences against us.

 Who amongst us does want to yell "get your ass out of there"?Barnstone clings to the relationship less for affection than for a reason to continue writing poems like this one. Poems written in bad faith about bad faith give evidence not just of bad, self-pitying verse, but gives obvious clues to an underlying disorder.I prayer is that Barnstone gets a relationship that is everything she desires it to be, and writes a poetry that doesn't reinforce a pathology.

 I've heard from what others have posted that the late Lyn Lifshin, a very good poet I've read for sometime, has passed away. I haven't located more details, but I will offer instead that she was a wonderful lyric poet, with sharp observation shown in spare but powerful images, with a frame of mind to observe, contemplate and find parallels between ideas and objects that  wouldn't inhabit the same sentence. 

Her poetry was not skeletal, not minimalist, it had rhythm , pace , a real pulse , but it was not cluttered; her best poems had the remarkable resonance of one those things a friend says to you in passing, a story, a notion, something that  was observed, something actually uttered , which had the accidental genius of having the right words for an idea that could just as easily been talked to death. Lifshin was a remarkable poet, and we are poorer both as readers and poets alike for the loss of her. 

Two poems:

MOVING BY TOUCH

that afternoon an

unreal amber

light 4 o'clock the

quietness of

oil February blue

bowls full of

oranges we were

spreading honey, butter

on new bread our

skin nearly touching

Even the dark wood glowed

BUT INSTEAD HAS GONE UNDERGROUND

A woman goes into the subway,

and for what reason

disappears behind rails

and is never heard from again.

We don't understand this.

She could have gone to the museum,

had cappuccino with a lover.

But instead has gone down the

escalator, without i.d., or

even a ticket and not 

for clothes or flowers. It was

a grey humid day,

very much like today.

It was today. Now you might

imagine I'm that woman, it 

seems there are reasons.

But listen, I don't live

anywhere near that metro stop

and who I am is already

camouflaged behind

velvet and leather

A POEM BY PAUL AUSTER

An ironic choice, I suppose, considering my post earlier against writing that reflects upon its own processes, but Auster's style is so clear of dead weight qualifiers that he gets across some of the mystery involved in composing a verse, a quality that eludes other writers. A novelist by trade, Auster's fiction often fashion themselves after mystery novels where every assumption and cover story is questioned, and in which action is moved forward by chance; whole chains of events and consequences in his best fiction-- The New York Trilogy, Book of Illusion, Leviathan-- that depend on the fickle choices of where one desires to place themselves, on impulse, on the spur of the moment.

WHITE NIGHTS 

No one here, 

and the body says: whatever is said

is not to be said. But no one

is a body as well, and what the body says

is heard by no one

but you.

Snowfall and night. The repetition

of a murder

among the trees. The pen

moves across the earth: it no longer knows

what will happen, and the hand that holds it

has disappeared.

Nevertheless, it writes.

It writes: in the beginning,

among the trees, a body came walking

from the night. It writes:

the body's whiteness

is the color of earth. It is earth,

and the earth writes: everything

is the color of silence.

I am no longer here. I have never said

what you say

I have said. And yet, the body is a place

where nothing dies. And each night,

from the silence of the trees, you know

that my voice

comes walking toward you.

White Nights likewise comes across as a detective novel , combined with a ghost story; within in it are the themes of someone writing something in isolation wondering if anyone will read, how anything will change if a readership is found, how the writing lives on in the writer's words haunting a stranger years later, in another part of the world. This is poetry Don DeLillo would write, I think, if he were more attuned to the associating residue the covers a landscape or neighborhood that was once familiar but is now estranged by time. There is a novelist's precision in declarative statements like " The pen moves across the earth: it no longer knows what will happen, and the hand that holds it has disappeared " that mimics perception itself, how something beheld can seem so clear and self-contained to its purpose, place and use and yet morph from the particular to a swirling ambiguity with the slightest alteration of mood. It comes , finally, to that flashing recognition a reader experiences when another's words confirms  refinement of feeling one has felt in their own travels through an amorphous existence. I think the poem is lovely but finally undecidable to  precise meaning. Add here that that most poetry that's worth reading is undecidable to major degrees .But that is the whole point, I would think.

TWITTER POEMS

 

A VERY LITTLE OF KAY RYAN

 

Meghan O'Rourke offered a credible description and defense of our of past U.S. Poet Laureate, but as much as I enjoy the reasoning, I find the idea of Kay Ryan , Poet, more interesting than Kay Ryan's poetry. I'm not a fan of ornate language, since most poets do it badly, even those who are praised for it as a default remark, including our drifting poet Laureate Derek Walcott--if similes were empty wine bottles , he'd have drunk himself to death--but I would like some elegance and lift in the briefer lines as well, some polish besides the formulations Ryan offers us from the page. The poems are lean, yes, clever with their internal rhymes, slants, conceits and all the rest, but there isn't the stamp of a personality to enliven these dry dictations. She is compared to Dickinson rather excessively, since Ryan's aim is to move toward a point she's cutting through the underbrush toward; she seems to know before hand what she's driving at, and for me so much of what she does amounts to seeing a neighbor park their car in the same spot for years after the work day is over. 

Dickinson's minimalism is a slippery stream to wade into; her habit was to meet herself coming the other way while on an investigation of a nuance; she contained and expressed her own contradicting assertions. Dickinson is the more interesting poet for all the material she implies, suggest, touches up with the minimum of space her poems consume; the dashes and asides still bother us, provoke discussion. Ryan is of the generation that thinks poetry has to have a point to make , a purpose to reaffirm. This makes her work, finally, fatally forgettable.

I'd be pleased if a poet preferring small matters to large themes became our Poet Laureate, but in the matter of Kay Ryan, I find her work malnourished, under muscled, simply lifeless and still as a rusty coin in a cushion crack. She is part of what is termed The School of Quietude, a dismissive term coined by Ron Silliman to describe the poets of the larger market place who concentrate on approaches to poetry that will not attempt to tackle more than one idea at a time. I have less animus toward poets who desire to do one thing well before moving on the next matter at hand, and have taken more than a bit of joy reading Billy Collins, Robert Haas. Collins, though, is someone whom you "get" in short order , amused , shall we say, but his stylish effects but with no compelling reason to revisit the poem. Dickinson, certainly not a Quietuder (although she has been mentioned in conjunction with Ryan's name) , shows all of us that compact does not mean straight forward; whole philosophies and shades of far reaching intellection exist between those dashes. We read her because she's not easy to reach; with each re-reading, the reader tends to bring more to their experience of her work. Collins gets paraphrased, like a joke one half-recalls. The impression he leaves is soon smooths out into a general nothingness like the white noise that makes up radio static.

The compressed diction, the ruthlessly scoured syntax and sparse, clean rhythms (or rhythm- less, at times) is breath taking when it works in the world of single-subject poets, analogous to rare moments when a perception, an odd and unplanned arrangement of things, surprises you when your eyes come to rest on them. It's the sight of surprise, the aha!, and the short formers, the Quietuders likely excavate against excess rhetoric and come upon the one thing they are writing about. It's not an easy thing to do well. But more often it is mere shtick, a form of slick aptitude for evading the harder edges a poet would be expected to walk on. One idea, maybe too, a fine turn of phrase, a quick exit. Ryan, though, isn't even this interesting. My problem with Ryan is that too often she seems to be getting started on an idea , about to unravel some mystery of a material thing and connect it with an ongoing argument each poet has against Platonic idealism, but she leaves, she darts away, she is elsewhere after her aggravations are generated.

Bad Day 

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are

the hard days

for the tailor elf. 

 

From Say Uncle, 2000 

One admires skeletal purity and an aesthetic that won't be overstated or festooned with gamy rhetoric, but there are some things Ryan might have taken from the more formal approaches she turned her back on, central among them the need to finish a thought. As with the above, the ganging up of internal rhymes makes this poem cute as a button, but not effective as a poem. It would serve, I suppose, as a set up for a longer set of complications with the size of the clothes one is supposed to wear, but the theme is rather banal, that one grows out of their clothes as they age and gain weight, and complications don't seem to interest Ryan anyway. Incompleteness can indeed be appealing in a poet who provides a strong sense of the absent details they address elliptically--strong points for Dickinson and the fascinating Rae Armentrout--but Ryan's is not that kind of poet.Her poems make you lean in so you can hear this soft voice suss through contradictions and the follies of fanciful thinking, but it ends in a mumble.

One should consider the work of a lesser known but though brilliantly clear eyed poet named Kate Watson, a writer I know and was was featured with in a 1996 anthology Small Rain: Eight Poets from San Diego (D.G.Wills Books). Her tone is modulated, her sentences balance tactile adjectives and purring verbs with an uncanny equilibrium, and her quiet moments transcends the perceived banalities of the School of Quietude and actually enters into perceptions that sweetly unique, clear, aesthetically riveting. Something is arrived at. The rare thing about my friend Kate is that her version of considering the thing-in-and-of-itself is without the faux profundity so many other poets would evoke inspite of their best efforts to rein in their egos; poets by nature have a hard time stepping from being the Arnoldian seer/priest. Kate Watson's is a poetry that is in large part free of those posturing suppositions. 

Smudge

Pussycat,

pink eared, squints

in the sunshine,

sniffing flowers.

Button-eyed, she

purrs and

furlicks my legs

in the kitchen.

Four years ago, four

kittens born

in a drawer, smelled

of a barnyard.

Mature, she sleeps

in a circle,

the slope of her head suggests--young doe.

Trinity

She meets I

in the body

which is one

with my mother

I can see

where sits by the blue fire

flame-quick knitting

Is she sighing

shall I sing

she is I

am a long way away

when the wind blows

white wall coal black

light grey hair

my mother winks

from the middle of the flame

and I rise up

and leave her

alone

In the fire a reflection

coming home?

(C) 2008 Kate Watson 

This is just a way of saying that the Library of Congress could have made a better choice. Saying that they could have done worse than Ryan doesn't say much for for the office nor for what good graces are to be found in her conceit-laden lines.

THE JOY OF READING RON PADGETT

 
Ron Padgett is every bit the off -hand and fresh-phrasing poet Billy Collins wants to be, and it's his particular genius to write in such a way that he hears what is truly and spontaneously poetic in actual speech and yet has the sense to contain the vernacular with real cadence and rhythm. Though he is eager to avoid the idea of being the Poet/Priest officiating over the mundane life oracle-like in his verse depositions of the every day and the noticed and familiar, Collins seem The Professional all the same, and not in a way I intend as complimentary. Admirable though it is that he seeks to be remain approachable to a reader with only a glancing interest in poetry, his poems are too neat, orderly, the illogic that ought to be at work behind the machinery of language operating much too logically as they arrive at those last stanzas, last lines, and concluding images that are supposed to make you gasp so slightly, close your eyes and wonder how it was the poem started with a man getting his mail or paying a bill and winding up in some other part of the world playing jazz records and reading airport novels. 

Collins delivers,, he makes you laugh, cry, coo and ooh on schedule: in another existence I think he might have been the local human-interest columnist for a hometown newspaper, cleverly discussing characters community and bits of homelife three times a week, one thousand words a column, clever, effective, predictable in their habit of surprising people. Much as he likes jazz, there is not a moment of surprise in Collins' poems. But Padgett? He writes what he sees, he sings what he reads, he paints what he talks, which is to say that this poet, a grand figure in the New York School of poets, has a a genuine feel for the city vibe, artists , writers, trashman bar maids, cab drivers and street corner preachers and  influencing his multiple-tongued qualities as a poet so that discourse in his poems, all discourse, whether dissertations or cookie recipes, become idiomatic and equal in their expressive and poetic potential. Padgett is a counter-puncher, a riffer, someone approach the chatter  and prate of the big city leaning a little to the side, and back, as though anticipating a swing for his jawline. 

  Only a poet tuned into the weights and varying degrees of gravity a line of phrases and images can sound like if they're managed well can write these types of visual astute poems. His is a poetry of framing a perception at the moment it occurs, a sense of the banal giving rise to new formations of thought; the world is askew despite what appears to be sameness and order, and Padgett's method of ordering it all is askew as well. There is in him a capacity to be surprised without sounding like he's a taffy-headed cretin. There is wonder here, not wondering, which is to say he provides the reader with a clarity that incredibly manages to add to the mystery of the thing or emotion he's trying to contain.

Rialto

When my mother said Let’s go down to the Rialto

it never occurred to me that the name Rialto

was odd or from anywhere else or meant anything

other than Rialto the theatre in my hometown

like the Orpheum, whose name was only a phoneme

with no trace of the god of Poetry, though

later I would learn about him and about the bridge

and realize that gods and bridges can fly invisibly

across the ocean and change their shapes and land

in one’s hometown and go on living there

until it’s time to fly again and start all over

as a perfectly clean phoneme in the heads

of the innocent and the open

on their way to the Ritz.

Padgett has a contagious high spirit , and a large part of what attracts the reader to him is constant sense of surprise; right at the point when matters of thought, situation and action tend towards a fatal gravity, we come across one of his zany associations. The effect is of driving for a long period while listening to an earnest, or at least a belligerent discussion on talk radio when your passenger suddenly changes the changes; sometimes it’s sudden and hard, like the hard jab of fingertip to radio button, or screeching, chaotic and questing, like someone turning the knob up and down the AM dial. A mixture of different measures and accents of modulated speech covering news, weather and traffic conditions and a class struggle of music zips by you while the world the car barrels through promises only more commotion, kinetics, and, for Padgett, surprise and joy .

Fixation

It's not that hard to climb up

on a cross and have nails driven

into your hands and feet.

Of course it would hurt, but

if your mind were strong enough

you wouldn't notice. You

would notice how much farther

you can see up here, how

there's even a breeze

that cools your leaking blood.

The hills with olive groves fold in

to other hills with roads and huts,

flocks of sheep on a distant rise

Padgett’s poems at their heart expose the commotion we set ourselves off on as we struggle with what we think existence is doing to us, leaving the effect of a supremely comic sense that’s been honed, whittled and made coolly efficient by pratfalls and even further extremes of snit-fueling agitation. Every nick, dent, gaffe, scrape and scratch that appears in the sentences he writes ,for their sharp transitions, non-squitor leaps of association and the AM radio declarative voice that seems to render past and present and future into a jazzy continuity,  Padgett lets it fly, love lyric or joke or something improbably beautiful that capture an image that itself contains a universe of incidents that puts the reader at the scene.

NOTHING IN THAT DRAWER

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

Nothing in that drawer.

There is in him a capacity to be surprised without sounding like he's a taffy-headed cretin. There is wonder here, not wondering, which is to say he provides the reader with a clarity that incredibly manages to add to the mystery of the thing or emotion he's trying to contain. Padgett is inside his engagement, not separated from it; what works in his poems is his capacity, like Frank O'Hara in his best, unguarded moments, to remained stunned at a flashing perception; a dozen or so combinations of thinking about what's unfolded in front of you rush by like so many film frames even as the phenomenon is still in the process of revealing itself. This is meant as a compliment, as sincere praise; Ron Padgett reminds of someone who is constantly gathering his wits.

THE BALLAD OF PHIL OCHS

 

The Revelle Campus Cafeteria at UCSD, 1970, was the first time I became entirely aware of folksinger/anti-war activist and counter culture hero Phil Ochs. He was performing to a full house of hippies, New Left agitators, Marxist professors with a collective lapse of enthusiasm for talk of revolution, rattled undergraduates, and unsmiling advocates for black power and feminism at an anti-war fundraiser, organized by one of the many ad hoc coalitions that attempted to join the far-flung nether regions of the counterculture in common cause. Ochs made a name for himself as the genius pamphleteer among his generation of left-leaning folkies that he was a part of. Considered by the critical mafia to be the heir to Bob Dylan’s protest throne, an easy assumption might be that Dylan ceased writing topical protest in favor of more personal and sort of surreal existentialism in his lyrics. Ochs was a hero of mine, the poet and the wise guy who stirred up audiences with a critical rhyme, a sly smile, a riveting argument you couldn’t ignore. 

Born in 1940 in El Paso, Texas, a young Ochs—and as a teenager—showed exceptional musical promise as a clarinetist and becoming the principal chair on that instrument with the Capital University Conservatory of Music in Ohio. His ears, to be sure, picked up the pop and rock music of the day, ranging from Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash and became fascinated with the movie rebel icons Marlon Brando and James Dean. After a two-year stint at a military academy, he became obsessed with current events, deciding that he wanted to be a writer, a journalist, specifically. His interest in politics motivated him to take up music again in the form of an acoustic guitar and to become heavily involved in the pervasive folk boom of the time, learning a rich catalogue of old folk songs in myriad traditions and to start writing the most poetic, powerful, and passionate protest and topical songs this side of Dylan himself. Ochs performed everywhere he could for the cause of justice, whether it was in clubs, concert halls, anti-war rallies, or civil rights marches of all sorts. He was a romantic, a visionary, a starry-eyed optimist who believed that the oppressed people of America would throw off the chains that bound them and would one day walk into the horizon as free brothers and sisters. The optimism, seemingly resilient and unbreakable at first, yet frayed the longer the Vietnam War dragged on and the persistence of racism remained. Depression became a more pronounced part of his personality—alcohol became a more constant companion, and his songwriting became darker, more fatalistic, hinting at several instances of his own coming demise. He was delusional and paranoid. Making his depression more severe was an assault on him by robbers when he was Tanzania, which resulted in his vocal chords being damaged. His voice never recovered, and his inability to sing brought him deeper despair. 

At the zenith of his popularity, Ochs was a facile protest singer-songwriter during the Sixties, having written perhaps his most famous song, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” He was an able rabble rouser at peace rallies and civil rights marches who could fire up dormant liberal sympathies into anger and shame. The advent of the Seventies meant a total turnaround of musical styles and political attitudes. Still, the white knight of worthy causes was considered passé, and his music became an object of instant obsolescence. Not content to be a professional has-been, Ochs attempted on his final album trilogy (Pleasures of The Harbor, Tape from California, Phil Ochs’ Greatest Hits, and Rehearsals for Retirement) to follow the new musical trends, using rock musicians, Sgt. Pepper-styled electronic effects, and massive orchestration cast in the mold of Charles Ives. The net result was a confused jumble of affectations, with plenty of good material nearly smothered under an avalanche of desperate gimmickry. Ochs and his producer absorbed precisely the worst elements of what the Beatles were doing with their in-studio experiments—a convoluted eclecticism that nearly choked the life out of many of their best songs and made the slighter fare they filled their later albums with becoming not just slight, but ineffectively elitist. 

His later songs, at their best and most penetrating, were haunting encapsulations, sketching the displaced anomie of his generation that found itself in a new set of cultural conditions where people would rather dance than organize, and eerily foreshadowing Ochs’ own sense of self-apocalypse. “Tape From California,” the song, is a rocking sojourn through an activist’s shattered psyche—someone woken from a long sleep and finding a terrain not by a community of authentic people working to change the society for the better but rather by hippies, drug freaks, record company PR men, hip magazine writers, scene makers, blow job artists, flunkies, junkies, alcoholic poets without notebooks, and self-declared painters of all sorts who never touched a canvas, everyone one of them feigning art and culture by looking, in truth all of them, for a cheap thrill to last until the garbage trucks arrived. 

“The Crucifixion,” Ochs’ masterwork, is a complex, extended allegory about the way a culture treats its heroes (Christ and JFK), according to the best virtues they’d like to see in themselves, and then watching them with negrophilic glee as they are systematically destroyed, a process that begins when the heroes encroach too close to where the change must be made. The version here is, blessedly, live and free of the special effects clutter that spoiled the studio original. Ochs’ voice is plaintive and unadorned, with an implicit, devastating sorrow to phrasing. “The War Is Over,” first seeming like one of the brilliant anti-war tomes Ochs was capable of writing, but rather turns out to be a solipsist daydream. Ochs had been a veteran of countless free benefits and was dismayed that he could sing and declare the same worn out polemics time after time and effect nothing, except perhaps eliciting a momentary surge of self-righteous, smug radicalism in his audiences. The war, meanwhile, trudged on, a fact that caused Ochs to throw his hands in the air and declare the war was over, at least as far as he was concerned. 

The last song on the compilation, “No More Songs,” concludes the album on a thoroughly depressing note. Voice and melody drenched in a defeated, archly lyric melancholia, he recalls the people he’s known, the things he’s believed in, the lovers he’s had, and moans that all was in vain. With the past being meaningless, he complains that there are “… no more songs,” and then recedes into a numbing orchestral backwash. The first record, comprised strictly from his protest material, is the least interesting of the set. The topicality is dated and irrelevant to anyone’s current state of mind, and the enthusiasm of Ochs’ idealism comes off as youthfully smug and embarrassing. 

This song is so beautifully tragic and precise in its sense of despair and crushed idealism that I begin to tear up every time I hear it. It was the last song on his final album, the ironically titled Greatest Hits. Released on the heels of the presciently named Rehearsals for Retirement in 1969, the songs on Greatest were a combination of remembrance and morose reflection upon a world that could not match his greatest hopes for the future; it seemed a final bow, the lyrics of a man saying goodbye to all that. Ochs did, in fact, take his own life by hanging himself on April 9, 1976. He was 36 years old. Late in his career Ochs had taken to dressing up in a gold lamé suit and famously telling a booing audience in Carnegie Hall that America could only be saved by a revolution, which wouldn’t have happened until Elvis Presley became our Che Guevara. Ochs, who was a true romantic, believing that Great Men with Great Causes can change the world for the better, was also an alcoholic and a man given to depression that deepened as he got older. Much of his songwriting became a series of melancholic laments that dwelled on the smashing of the idealism that had fueled his songwriting as an anti-war and civil rights activist earlier in the Sixties and the failure of his personal relationships. 

Hello, hello, hello, is there anybody home? 

I’ve only called to say, I’m sorry

The drums are in the dawn and all the voices gone

And it seems that there are no more songs

Once I knew a girl, she was a flower in a flame

I loved her as the sea sings sadly

Now the ashes of the dream, can be found in the magazines

And it seems that there are no more songs

Once I knew a sage, who sang upon the stage

He told about the world, his lover

A ghost without a name, stands ragged in the rain

And it seems that there are no more songs

The rebels they were here, they came beside the door

They told me that the moon was bleeding

Then all to my surprise, they took away my eyes

And it seems that there are no more songs

A star is in the sky, it’s time to say goodbye

A whale is on the beach, he’s dying

A white flag in my hand and a white bone in the sand

And it seems that there are no more songs

Hello, hello, hello, is there anybody home?

I’ve only called to say, I’m sorry

The drums are in the dawn and all the voices gone

And it seems that there are no more songs

It seems that there are no more songs

It seems that there are no more songs 

Strangely, bizarrely, and fantastically out of context, I saw Phil Ochs perform this song on a Cleveland dance TV show called Upbeat, hosted by a local DJ who was  trying to understand why Ochs, acoustic guitar in hand, was on a teen dance show along with a parade of bubblegum rock and pop soul bands that performed bad lip sync renditions of their regional hits songs. The DJ knew enough about Ochs to know that he was a protest singer by trade and mentioned that, with recent civil rights legislation and with the Paris Peace talks taking place in an attempt to end the Vietnam War, the otherwise gutless host said that Ochs might be out of a job unless he sang more upbeat tunes or words to that effect. Ochs just smiled and said that he hoped for the best, and then performed “No More Songs” live, on acoustic guitar. I remember this being one of the few songs that haunted me and continued to haunt me for decades. 

At his best, Phil Ochs was a subtle and brilliant singer and songwriter and especially as a lyricist, a true poet. He was someone who could easily belong to the songwriter branch of the Confessional Poets like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, writers of odd mental activity who were compelled to write their demons into verse in perhaps some effort to extract their awfulness from their souls. It has been suggested that writing is a species of self-medication, a means to alleviate distress without the means to grow stronger and find hope. It’s been suggested as well that this was a school of writing and a habit of thinking for which early death, either by one’s own hand or through the degenerative results of copious alcohol and drug abuse, was how a poet of this description achieved a reputation and legitimacy as a poet. This was something that had repulsed me as I parsed 20th-century poets in college, my idea at the time being that one had to insist that art embrace life and affirm its vitality. I didn’t read confessional poets for years but came to a change in my thinking that effectively set aside my previous conceit that poetry, let alone any art, was required to advance any one’s preferences as an arbitrary standard. Each poet, painter, writer, dancer had to live up to that standard; the muse to create came from whatever source it came from, manifesting its inspiration in our personalities and our need to express our comforts and misgivings as creatures in this sphere of existence. It was under no requirement to make our lives better, let alone save ourselves from a wicked end or at least the bad habits that can make lives sordid, squalid endurance contests. Everyone is different, everyone has their own story to tell, everyone’s fate is their own and no one else’s. Most live more or less normal lives, wherever that is on the continuum of behaviors, no matter how good or bad or how many poems they write. Others are just… doomed. I am reminded of Harold Bloom’s assertion that literature’s only use is to help us think about ourselves in the world, the quality of being nothing more nor less than humans struggling through life with wit and grit, creating and failing and destroying with an array of emotion and words to give them personality. The job of the poet isn’t to instruct others in how to live a full life, but rather chronicle the unending problematic situations of the life were are constantly trying to negotiate a contract of conduct with, only to find, again, that life is a pure, unceasing process, churning, burning, destroying, and creating from the ash and mire. 

The poet records the ironies that will not stop coming, the lessons that will always be taught to the same romantics, adventurers, would-be saints, and dime store dictators. It is one of the ironies of modern existence and the expansion of all media that the subjects of protest songs, songs that are very specific to a cause or to an injustice, no longer seem to spark the desire to work toward bettering the world that the romantics among us wish would come to be. The embarrassment has more to do with our own memories than with Ochs’ politics. A posthumous collection of his songwriting, the two-disc Chord of Fame from 1976, scans the timeline from the way we were, thinking we could change the world with good sentiments if not concrete policies, to the way we are now, with ideals shattered and wearing a chic cynicism. For my part, I continually thank Ochs for being a major influence in forcing me to confront and accept social justice as a living principal and work mightily to avoid the fatal view that claimed this brilliant man’s life.

RANDOM BITS

 I'm often curious what Slate's poetry editor Robert Pinsky must think of the reader response in the Poetry Fray forum section of that online magazine. Here are the last two week's of his selections, one yay, another nay in my perhaps annoying estimations: "Riding Westward" is an extraordinarily good poem for most of its length, a knowing evisceration of a venerable American icon, a myth stripped of it's power and portent , with nothing left but dress, mannerism, the predictable slew :

Compromise his very own shoot-'em-up

tilt to the brim of his hat self, smirk to match,

all-for-love-if-it's-gotta-come-to-that half

swagger,

half unintentional, I think, sashay. 

Phillips reads as if he's hung around a few country and western bars and had gotten fairly tired of seeing an endless stream of gas-station buckaroos strut and preen their big hat up and down too many sawdust and spit covered floors to put up with it anymore. But this poem becomes a ghost story of sorts, an observation of what's left on earth after the power of particular symbols cease of have any real, practical force;  

The silver spurs at his ankles where maybe

the wings would be, if the gods still existed,

catch the light, lose it, as he stands in place,

scraping the dirt with his boots: lines, circles

that stop short, shapes that mean nothing—

no bull, not like that, but scraping shyly, like

a man who's forgotten that part of himself,

keeps forgetting, because what the fuck? 

What's left is all mannerism, gesture, cults that consist essentially of dress up parties among  those in later decades who rummage through the past trying to find or at least construct a useful set of props and stylistic tics with which they can create an identity and hence a purpose. Yet the hats, the boots, the song he sings bemoaning an idealized loneliness under red Western sunsets are iconic and empty; nothing of this comes from the need to survive, but rather the need to belong to something with a fixed certainty.  This is an interesting poem to contrast and compare against Ed Dorn's epic poem "Gunslinger", where the poet reconfigures a series of Western icons into a search for some real matter and meaning beyond what mere language can manage with it's crippling dualisms;it's an anti-epic poem that prefigures many post-modern gestures from its 60s era starting point. Funny, cartoonish, erudite to the extreme, it also locates a tuned lyricism in the Western vernaculars that Dorn uses: the metaphysical aspect of our legends, the sheer questing for answers as Euro-Americans come treading closer to a West coast that will stop them and force them to settle and create lives from dust and ingenuity, comes alive in way that never escapes the zaniness of Dorn's narrating inquiry into the nature of the search.  

Phillips takes in the same set of aggregated props and conventional wisdom and sees instead the gaping emptiness beyond the heady glee of being dressed up in the spare vocabulary of personal codes and principled ruggedness. It's all empty and bankrupt, a story we tell to keep the darkness away. Phillips hints at something more profound than the cosmic silliness he sees with the strutting, posing and atonal warbling of prairie songs: our costumes represent nothing but wishful thinking , and that such thinking is the closet we stand to being transported to a serene, transcendent place. The gods have died, Phillips states, and we are left with our lives to either accomplish something real, or to wander about deluded, reduced by stereotypical narratives of individuality.

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It might be said that was impossible to make anger a boring subject for a poem until Aliki Barnstone tried her hand at it. "Anger", Robert Pinsky's selection for the week, is set in situation a good many --too many-- of us recognize as awkward, strained, thoroughly unpleasant, a dinner for two who, sitting presumably at opposite ends of the table as they cut and chew their food with controlled strokes and grinding, manage a language in which they put each other on trial. Each has a turn to outline their argument , to make their case, the casing of civility chipping away with

every stroke of knife and stab of fork:

 

Yet we sit together at the table, each to serve

the other artfully poisoned morsels, point a fork,

and go on and on, watching the widening distance.

This would work, perhaps,if this were a fresher take on a soured relationship, but the poem treads territory that is too familiar, and Barnstone's greatest mistake here is over writing the scenario her template provides. The poem reads like a set up for a knockout punch that does not materialize from the corner she's trying to fight her way out of. It goes on too long, and the device of comparing this meal and its discontents to a trial is less a metaphor than a reason to write further , to add stanzas.  

You say, "You should have listened to me,"

and, "But you had to be you, didn't you?"

Then I become the witness who testifies against me.

We deliberate all night, inventing counterpoints,

narrowing our vision at spears of candlelight

and we go on and on, watching from a distance,

as we appeal, go back to discovery, retry, seek

sympathy by recounting suffering and history,

though this defense may deliver the verdict against us: 

 

The prosecutable element would have worked  if it were brief, even fleeting, and if it were a means to segue into something else about the world this couple thought they were living in contrasted the world they now perceive as they relationship, presumably, slowly grinds to a stop. Barnstone might have managed something genuinely poetic if there were a sign , in images, of how the reality has changed. Rather, "Anger" reads as if Barnstone were too fascinated with the mechanics of making her -trial conceit work; the poem is damaged by repetition, needless volume. It is a mistake of perception, the assumption that the length of a piece is a measure of it's value.This length equals a long wait in a doctor's office.Grating as well is the last stanza, where Barnstone's woman character, the "I" narrator, has a failure of nerve and instead wallows in the misery she and her husband/boyfriend make for each other:

our embrace will pull us down

through the shades, and we'll hold on to our grievances

and go on, too watchful, unable to get some distance,

reading and helplessly rereading the sentences against us. 

 

Who amongst us does want to yell "get your ass out of there"?Barnstone clings to the relationship less for affection than for a reason to continue writing poems like this one. Poems written in bad faith about bad faith give evidence not just of bad, self-pitying verse, but gives obvious clues to an underlying disorder.I prayer is that Barnstone gets a relationship that is everything she desires it to be, and writes a poetry that doesn't reinforce a pathology.

BEAUTIFUL AND POINTLESS

 David Orr is a smart writer and poet who has taken on the task to add yet another apology regarding poetry and its under the radar status with most readers, yet another attempt to make the craft less off-putting to a larger audience. It is an enjoyable book , but the joining of poet and readership is not something that can be accomplished by easy suggestions ; as usual, I adhere to the pragmatist dictum that the value of any theory is in how it works, which means, to paraphrase, the allure of any poem, in any style, of any theory, of any agenda composed in English, resides mostly with the talent of the individual poet. 

We get into matters about how well the poet has absorbed and assimilated their readings, ie, "made them his/her own", how broadly they've outgrown their influences and progressed toward their own version of originality and genius, of course. At the end of the day and long into the night and the following morning, what draws a reader to a poet again after a first reading was the quality of the stanzas, the line breaks, the stylization of the verbs and the spare placement of the adjectives, the use of imagery that seemed both unique and yet plausible, the use of metaphor that is delivered smoothly, invisibly, musically. It is, I think, less a matter on whether a poet opts for simpler diction and terse couplets in regimented rhyme schemes, or a shambling flow that winds through so many associative canyon highways before coming to something resembling a poetic effect; poets are not unlike jazz improvisers of the language, which is to say that how ever they choose to address a problem they've assigned themselves, it comes down to if the writer has developed as style that has an elegance that adheres to and extends the dictates of their chosen form, if the poems in question have their activity placed in the world the poet is nominally apart of, and if this is accomplished with the least amount of pretentious self-awareness. 

This is to say that what makes a poem an attractive item to return to again and to ruminate about depends on the skill the poet can forget the prevailing nonsense that "poems are always read in the context of other poems" and get on with their task of fathoming more interesting mysteries, oddities, paradoxes and alluvial epiphanies the experience of being alive, breathing and seeing brings us. There is nothing wrong with living in your head, per se, but even poets need to stop watching the dust gather on the furniture and go for a walk, a drive, a movie, a date.

HOW DO YOU WRITE A GOOD POEM?

 If you have any desire to write poems that are distinctive, fresh and are notable for having a language style that is interesting and able to “express the inexpressible in terms of the unforgettable “, you have to cleanse yourself of the vanity that everything you write as a poem is precious and must remain untouched . 

You have to read what you’ve written with a critical eye and find out what it is you’re trying to say , and then chip away everything that in the draft that does not add up to a convincing poetic sequence. Having favorite poets and being aware of the techniques that make up their style is a must; if you understand why particular poets appeal to you, have an effect on you, cause you think about your world in a more nuanced way, then you have the start in developing a good critical ear for your own work. There are things that great poets like Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Eliot, Laux, Wanda Coleman, O’Hara do make their poems memorable and a proper and alluring expression of their personalities.

 So it wouldn’t be at all harmful to your creative expression to get into the weeds a bit and study precisely HOW your favorite writers are achieving the resonance that comes from a well considered poem. This will likely improve your habit of mind as you compose and will strengthen your creative flow while writing. Along that line, you have treat your first draft as a first draft and realize that half of what goes into a poem, more often than not, is rewriting, revision, correction, editing.

 I was told by a poet fifty years ago that in order to make something wonderful in the form of a poem, the “best writing has to be removed.” For me , this was getting rid of didactic language, lectures, pointless literary allusions, and concentrating on what is truly “poetic” in something I’d just written. This next point has an endless stream of variations, theories, styles and the lot and each has a coherent aesthetic , but any poet worth reading over time realizes the difference between poetry and prose. They do different things. As a wise writer named Clyde Hadlock once said of the two, “Prose is the photograph, poetry is the x-ray.” 

A few poems by LOUISE GLUCK

 Louise Gluck's poem,"Crater Lake",is cold as refrigerated marble , a specimen of wordy inertia. Not that it really matters, though, since the effect here is walking into a room thinking that it was empty and coming upon someone already there there, back turned toward the window, muttering phrases and broken references to whatever is passing on the street. 

There was a war between good and evil.

We decided to call the body good.

That made death evil.

It turned the soul

against death completely. 

You do get the feeling that there is a submerged attempt to marry myth archetypes with the sweltering and restless subconscious tensions that confront us as we, a race, reconcile the glory and agony of love and death, but Gluck boils her worries to an arhythmic, unmusical aridity. Think of that strident piano banging in Kubrick's most pretentious film Eyes Wide Shut; terse, strident cadences applied to a scenario of ritualized, debauched despair, pushed forth with a hardly an interesting nuance, phrase, image to part with and make us consider the further complications. The pretentiousness comes in large measure from Gluck's glib and unconsidered use of Big Terms in an effort to make a reader pause and inspect a line for a profundity that isn't there. "Good and evil", "love", "death" , "love" are all dished out like portions of food you don't want to eat--eeeewwww, cooked carrots, liver, creamed corn, grossssssssss--and yet we have to read and digest on the sorry promise that it's good for us. Gluck, though, recedes into a vagueness here that commits the worse sin one can manage for an oblique poem; it provides you with no reward for reading it. There is an absence of euphony whatever and underscores the notion that the poem fails because it cannot sustain itself without knowledge of the myths Gluck is ostensibly deconstructing.  It does, perhaps, fulfil a structural function with the single narrative which this poem is reported to be a part of, but the effect is lost here; we assume, the punch of this writing exists only its context with the other works that go with the storyline it obliquely refers to.

"A Myth of Innocence" [www.slate.com], which is lecturing, nearly hectoring, and weighed down by a ridiculous solemnity that reminds me of the pinched nerve seriousness of elder priests at mass whose ruthless lack of cheer or life would make a nine-year-old boy or girl want to liven things up with arm farts or gum popping. Gluck's writing is so weighted with unbelievably padded writing that it reads in slow motion, like a funeral march, through all the obvious paraphrases of overplayed myths and the cumbersome attempt to bring a universal concept into a private moment when one's loss becomes the sadness of the world.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,

I was abducted, but it sounds

wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.

Then she says, I was not abducted.

Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted

to escape my body. Even, sometimes,

I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance

wills something imagined, which it believes exists. 

This syntax is tied into knots and hamstrung loops of unfulfilled metaphor and allusion that it makes you think of a distracted chef who cannot complete a single plate of palatable food. I get a strong feeling that this poem is likewise composed of scraps, items intended for more complete poems, wholly coherent and perhaps fresher in their utterance. So many indefinite and transcendental qualities zig-zag in this writing, mentions of myth, reflecting pools, a yearning for a younger self and an unassigned future. It's a traffic jam of references, not particularly musical or convincing beyond nudging a reader in the ribs.This may be a poem that Gluck worked on quite a bit in order to give a semblance of poetic content, but no matter how she tailored her first draft the writing remains lifeless and unconvincing. I've written hundreds of poems that I hoped to make evocative with a mannered strangeness of phrase and allusion until I realized I had only produced a variety of convoluted poesy. Gluck should have cleared her palate, and gone for a simpler, less cluttered tongue to speak what her muse presents to her.

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Critic Robert Christgau commented once that Eric Clapton was a classy blues guitarist who was perfect for the tasty, brief statement but who had the habit of playing in long form and , consequently, losing emphasis, momentum, and gaining only redundancy. Something similar might apply to Gluck, who's strengths can be seen here, a confident voice, a sense of place, a subject addressed directly and indirectly without drift in a voice that still has the capacity to be surprised. This is a wonderful lyric, as much as other of her admirers might object to the term; she sounds like she had an idea of what she was trying to achieve. --tb

The Wild Iris

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.

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There's a poignant moment somewhere in At The Dance, but Louis Gluck's drifting, shapeless, monotonic style effectively obscures it. She is an outstanding example of the sort of poet who has charmed the chronically introverted and other over-thinkers who love to think they have a rich interior life but who can't really make it of any use; rather than measure among the experiences she's had and decide what carries the most weight and value. We are handed , over and over, a series of lumpy reminiscences that resemble a long gaze into a an unkept house; nothing gets thrown away , every item has equal value, and the narrative , such as it is, lacks any animation. Gluck loves to talk, but is hesitant, it seems, to create a hierarchy of signifiers that would create a momentum toward what she wanted us to assume was an inevitable irony. This is a droning piece, and what ought to have been a cleverly constructed series of parallels between the the protocols of dance, the rituals of attraction and the surrendering and reacquisition of power in interpersonal relationships is static instead, at best the the static-like rip of Velcro jacket being slowly pulled open.

By smell, by feel—a man would approach a woman, ask her to dance, but what it meant was will you let me touch you, and the woman could say many things, ask me later, she could say, ask me again. Or she could say no, and turn away, as though if nothing but you happened that night you still weren't enough, or she could say yes, I'd love to dance which meant yes, I want to be touched.

Some readers may find the seemingly un-ruddered drift of Gluck's poem appealing and opine that the spread of daily speech is in itself fascinating, and others would prefer that the writer remember that poetry is writing , distinct from speech, and that the power of daily speech would lay in how well the elements are selected, presented, given voice and cadence. Gluck , to my ears, is attempting an imagined transcription of a spontaneous utterance ; the effectiveness of something so literal is best spoken, I suppose, but here, sans sound facial expression, hand gestures, the pauses, rises and diminutions of the voice actual heard , I find the poem to be dormant. It does not move toward some crystallized set of particulars that memorably frame the exposition. In the area of prose poems detailing an author's bringing a past event into an at least temporary relief, I prefer Dorrianne Laux's poem How It Will Happen, When. Her tone is more engaged with the specific images that arise from her rummaging through her recent history--she shows an intimacy in the descriptions only the long view can provide, and yet holds back revealing the final mood as she constructs this poem neatly between the mess her mate left her to deal with, the ritual cleaning the house and the burning of all traces of what would remind her of a memory that would other wise shackle her, and the fast, unexpected revelation that what was an intellectualized acceptance of loss now hits her hard and without relief; triggered by a random occurence, she knows her mate is gone and not coming back, and this creates empathy within the reader. It's a poem of felt experience, and what I appreciate in Laux is her craft, which we do not see on the page. This has the power Gluck doubtlessly attempted in her poem. One might call this a poem of awakening, when young women discover what they are attracted to and that they , in turn, are attracting the attention of young men, and it's here where I think Gluck missed her opportunity to present us with something effective and delicately presented, which is the potentially metaphorical structure of dance It's not just that young women come to understand that they have attractions and are attractive in turn, but also a sense of empowerment; one finds themselves in a mysterious position of both drawing attention to themselves by simply being , and there is a gathering feeling that one might also control the elements about them with various, nascent rituals of beckoning and denial. She draws away, but does not flee the situation, she looks down, but does not leave his side, she watches where his hands touch her body and flinches at a sudden brush or attempted caress, but does not reprimand, lecture, become angry or afraid. 

This seems a dance no less than the location the title suggests, and what really dilutes the power these burgeoning emotions and impulses might have contained is the way Gluck , or her narrator -stand-in, goes on with a what comes to a dead pan recounting of the facts; her poetry, perhaps, was supposed to emerge from the tone, but I would have been interested in something more closely observed, with something more about the interactions between the young women and young men, the camps coming into the hall in various clusters and cliques, where they chose to stand, some snippets of overheard dialogue, the eventual pairing off and awkward exchange of exploratory small talk. This sounds more plotted than the monologue Gluck offers us, but it is a way this poem might have come alive with a sense of place rather than become what it remains, a routine , uninflected regret. Gluck sums up of the scenario in a quick application of the story's moral, a conspicuous working of the old saw that when a women means no, she really means yes. Something wonderfully twisted here might have emerged if she had hacked away at the talky qualifications around the poem's main points and pushed harder toward the edge, talking about how women and men cause hurt and are hurt in turn by misreading's of intent and gesture. 

What Gluck had here was a small poem, a minor sigh of regret in later life, the impression that strikes you when you're preparing for the day in front of you , or when you stop to catch your day. It is a slight insight into what had done in the awkwardness of maturing, but the scale of this thing, not epic length, not Ashberyesque in density , is, all the same, too much for this slight conceit. What might have been intriguing would be a juxtaposition of the narrator's current situation and the anecdote she's chosen, with a judicious use of the telling detail, the image that can stand alone, unadorned , which could contrast with an equally effective image . This is how one produces resonance that carry on beyond the page, and this is among the things that distinguishes poetry from the linear inclinations of typical prose. This is typical prose that requires an editor's blue pencil.

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The length of In the Cafe, appearing this week in Slate, would have you think that author Louise Gluck is a monologist. That's not the case, we find; a skilled monologist will have a a point or an effect they achieve , more often than not. Gluck's poem long lines are merely that, long, un-inflected,without snap or spice. Instead, we have a droning account of a male friend who happens to be a serial romancer--a sensitive male who absorbs portions of women's lives and energy over a period of time and then leaves them for the next adventure. It's not that this isn't worth writing about, but this is more topic drift development, an exercise in killing time. Gluck doesn't even go through the pretense of trying to make this intriguing as poetry and offers up the stale device of disguising undistinguished prose in irregular line breaks.

Gluck's long- form poetry is part of the disparaged School of Quietude, the conservative conglomeration of professional poets who's careerism controls the major book contracts, literary awards and plum teaching assignments who's market-pleasing style, a gush of self-infatuated musings that prefer to leave the reader hanging in murmuring waves of uncommitted relativism--the sort of work that doesn't move you to think beyond your conventional wisdom but leaves you anxiety -ridden in the decorated fringes of your misery. The attitude, among the worse offenders , seems to be gutless, indecisive, reflective rather than reflexive, passive rather than active in the world. One appreciates stillness and the sharply observed detail independent of an interfering ego, but that is not what Quietude, in the worst of it's world, is about; the poets seem to be bothered that they were cursed with compositional skills. You read them time and again and come away with the idea that a requirement among this coterie is to speak of themselves in their work as attempting to have an experience. You can feel the shrug , sense the poet dropping his pen, you can nearly hear the soft swearing under his or her breath about the perception being too hard to convey with wonder, awe, as a miracle in itself. That is to say, complacency wins again and the prospect of changing one's loath some circumstance is too frightening. One would rather suffer with what they know rather than dare a single foot step in another direction. The worst of this kind of poetry, I've heard, is like a three hour forced tour of your own living room.

Hers is better described, perhaps, as the "School of Drone", a kind of outlining of unexceptional incidents involving straw figures wherein a reader suffers what would have been a tolerable three minute on -air NPR essay about a diminutive epiphany stretched egregious lengths. that provoke involuntary teeth grinding. One doesn't really care about Gluck's portrait of a man-in-process; she attempts a neat inversion in maintaining, toward the end, that this man wasn't wasn't a bastard nor a feckless creep. By the time she grapples with her reasons for having sympathy for her comrade's quest for enlightenment, we are out of sympathy with her tale. This becomes the melodrama you switch the channel from.

It's cut-rate D.H.Lawrence, but without the  skewed erotics.She does, retain Lawrence's rhetorical bulk.Like him, she sounds like she's trying to talk herself into believing her basic premise as well as the reader, a trait that makes "In the Cafe" a dry lecture that hinges on a vague and brittle point. This poem is the equivalent of the bore at the party who continues to prate although everyone else has gone home and the lights are turned off .Adding to the despair over this poem's glacial pace is the promise of the first lines, which are bright, with a hint of witty resignation; 

It's natural to be tired of earth.
When you've been dead this long, you'll probably be tired of heaven.

It's a perfect set up for a story of an every man's quest for the place where he might find contentment in love and spirit. But where there might have been a telling comedy that provides the moral that our expectations undercut what we assume are our virtuous yearnings instead turns into a drab recollection. No time is wasted in weighing down the promise of the first two lines with the leaden grouchiness of the second two: .

You do what you can do in a place
but after awhile you exhaust that place,
so you long for rescue. 

This gives the whole game away.I wonder if this would have worked far, far better if Gluck had written this as a short story. The prose -quality of these lines might have bloomed a little more, breathed a little more air, the scenario might have been more compelling.The first lines are terrific and they could have been a poem by themselves, a condensing Gluck seemingly wants nothing to do with. Being succinct has amazing advantages.It provides an ending, a place to land. Gluck and other writers --myself at times--often mistake raw length for more substantial writing.Some writers have the gift to go long and reward the patient reader .Most do not, and few of us are Proust, few of us are Whitman, few of us are early Allan Ginsberg.