A review of Colosseum by Katie Ford.

By Sasha Dugdale
Poetry Media Service

Katie Ford’s new book, Colosseum, takes its title from a startling meditation on the Colosseum in Rome. “Built for slaughter,” the building saw gladiatorial combat, execution, and wild beasts tearing each other apart, and when the Roman Empire fell and the arena was left untended, exotic plants spread over the abandoned ground, sowed from seeds in the waste of the beasts. Caught at some oblique angle within the poem, another set of reflections concern the mayfly, whose 400 minutes of life and physical slightness are set against its survival “through antiquity with collapsing / horses, hailstorms and diffracted confusions of light.” The tiny mayfly and the massive tiered structure of the Colosseum are both cycles of destruction and renewal, turning slow and small, like the wheels of God:

When it is finished it is said
the expiring flies gather beneath boatlights
or lampposts and die under them minutely,
drifting down in a flock called snowfall.

Against the backdrop of constant mortality comes the real tragedy, spiritual desolation, which numbs the voice and renders it hoarse and hollow, the speaker clutching at the straws of objectivity and remoteness: “If I remember correctly,” “I said to myself.” The site of suffering is no longer the arena without, but the injured soul within: “When one is the site of so much pain, one must pray / to be abandoned.”

Ford’s collection has at its heart the more recent tragedy of New Orleans, blasted by Hurricane Katrina and then flooded. It is in three parts, the first dealing with the storm, the second with flight and return, and the third with grief. My apportioning seems rather crass: Colosseum is characterized by lyricism and fluidity, and its narrative rises out of a tangled confusion of events and objects. Much in the manner of a disaster, we are never entirely sure of sequence; we live through dark days and random happenings that must be pieced together intuitively, for they hardly belong together logically. Tragedy wipes out all linear notions: time, history, inheritance. One disaster merges into another, one victim into another. In a remarkable prose poem, “Division,” flight from New Orleans is within a landscape of constant geological movement: creasing, dividing. Catherine of Siena lived in hills like this, muses the lyrical voice, scouring her throat raw with twigs, so the communion she so desired would be felt:

She scalded herself at the baths, ran away to a cave, shoved twigs into her mouth so that when the host traveled down her raw throat she would indeed feel something, even a god breaking inside her.

Colosseum is a study of the psychology of survival. We are left in no doubt. This matter goes to the heart of the human condition, our condition:

We love the stories of flood and the few
told to prepare in advance by their god.
In that story, the saved are
always us, meaning:
whoever holds the book.
—“Ark”

At its most immediate, this is simply the attempt to grasp the cup of grief which runneth over: the woman who uses the wind to open her wrists; the desire to be an unthinking vessel with no heart to be torn into “strips of weed” (“Vessel”). But then there are the seismic shifts in our understanding that happen slowly, over time. There is nothing of permanence. People are lonely in their suffering. In the sonnet “Injury,” which opens with the plastic curtains around hospital beds, the injury is the transparency of those same curtains: “the thought we could not be harmed” has been felled and the convention of the sonnet is nothing more than a terrible empty irony.

Tragedy and devastation are hard things to write about in poetry, which doesn’t of course mean that they shouldn’t be attempted. There are terrible risks: voyeurism, sensationalism, the simple overbearing fact of the event. On the other hand, they are the stuff of poetry: Homer, Shakespeare, the poets of World War I in Britain, Mandelstam, Celan—all have provided a poetry that stands at some oblique angle to the suffering. Do you need to witness or partake of suffering to write about it? I think perhaps you do, if only to find the correct oblique angle from which to write. Katie Ford’s is a finely wrought lyrical beauty, a poetry of detail and care, but she has set it within an epic arc—the small wheel of individual life revolves within the larger human epic. And though we know that she has felt everything on her own pulse, still nothing is personal—the poems rise up through the clutter of the receding floods to become observations on the universality of suffering.

Excerpted from “Devastation and Digression,” originally published in the February 2009 issue of Poetry magazine and available at www.poetryfoundation.org. Sasha Dugdale is a poet and translator. She recently translated Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard for BBC Radio. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

© 2009 by Sasha Dugdale. All rights reserved.

Lowell’s and Bishop’s collected letters.

By Michael Hofmann
Poetry Media Service

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $45.00.

This is such a formidably and dramatically and lingeringly wonderful book, it is hard to know where to begin. Well, begin in the manner of the physical geographer and the embarrassed statistician and the value-for-money merchant, with quantity, though that’s absolutely the wrong place. Here, then, are 459 letters, 300 of them not previously published, exchanged over 30 years, between 1947 when the two great poets of late-20th-century America first met—Robert Lowell just 30, Elizabeth Bishop 36, each with one trade book and one round of prizes under their belts—and 1977 when Lowell predeceased his friend by two years; covering, all told, some 900 pages, from Bishop end-papers—one hand-scrawled, one typed—to Lowell end-papers—one in his laborious, also not greatly legible child-print (“I know I’m myself beyond self-help; and at least you can spell”), one typed. The apparatus of footnotes, chronology, and compendious glossary of names—take a bow, Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton—is modest, helpful, and accurate. At this point in our post-epistolary (no joke), post-literary, almost post-alphabetical decline, we would probably receive any collection of letters with a feeling of stupefied wistfulness and a sigh of valediction, but Words in Air is way beyond generic. It feels like a necessary and a culminating book, especially for Bishop. To read, it is completely engrossing, to the extent that I feel I have been trekking through it on foot for months, and I don’t know where else I’ve been. “Why, page 351,” I would say. “Letter 229; March 1, 1961. Where did you think?”

But what is it like? How, in fact, do you read it? “I am underlining like Queen Victoria,” Bishop remarks at one stage. How do you filter, assimilate, crunch it down to the space of a review? Its 800 pages of letters—every one of them bearing my ambiguous slashes of delight, interest, controversy, revelation—still left me with eight sheets full of page numbers of my own. It’s like starting with a city, and ending up with a phone book—hardly useful as a redaction. Really, I might as well have held a pencil to the margin and kept it there, for bulk reread.

It’s an epistolary novel—if not a full-blown romance, then at least, at moments, an amitié amoureuse. It’s a variation on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. Or it’s an Entwicklungsroman in later life, both parties already poets but perhaps more importantly still on the way to becoming poets (echoing the title of David Kalstone’s study), as perhaps one only ever and always is becoming a poet. It’s an ideally balanced, ideally complex account of a friendship, a race, a decades-long conspiracy, a dance (say, a tango?). It’s a cocktail of infernal modesty and angelic pride. It’s a further episode in Bishop’s increasingly sweeping posthumous triumph over her more obvious, more ambitious, more square-toed friend. It’s a rat-a-tat-tat ping-pong rally, an artillery exchange, a story told in fireworks, a trapeze show. One can read it for gifts sent up and down the Atlantic, from Lowell’s traditional Northeast seaboard to Bishop’s serendipitously-arrived-at Brazil, where she mostly lived from 1951 on, having arrived on a freighter for a short visit; for projects completed, adapted, revised, abandoned, published, and responded to; for blurbs solicited, struggled with, and delivered to greater or lesser satisfaction; for houses bought and done up and left; for other partners encountered and set down; for visits and time together passionately contrived, put off, and subsequently held up to memory or guiltily swept under the carpet; for gossip and the perennial trade in reputations; for a startlingly unabashed revelation of mutual career aid (“we may be a terrible pair of log-rollers, I don’t know,” writes Bishop in 1965, having asked Lowell for a blurb for Questions of Travel after he had asked her for one for Life Studies ); for loyalty and demurral, independent thinking and prudent silence, insistent generosity and occasional self-seeking; a longing to submit to the other’s perceived discipline and a desire to offer unconditional admiration; for personal, professional, and public events. One can read it for movements of place, for gaps in time, and discrepancies and disharmonies in feeling or balance; for the dismayed Bishop’s agonized criticism of aspects of two of Lowell’s books, the rather coarse free translations in Imitations of 1961 and the use of private letters from his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, in The Dolphin of 1973; for various other crises and cruxes: their heady, teasy-flirty mutual discovery of 1947, Bishop’s difficult visit to a near-manic Lowell in Maine in 1957, Lowell’s visit to Brazil and another manic episode in 1962, the death by suicide of Bishop’s companion Lota de Macedo Soares in 1967, Bishop’s uneasy return to Boston (to fill in for Lowell’s absence, if you please), and Lowell’s ultimate shuttling between wives and countries of the late ’70s. It’s social history, comedy of manners, American dissidence, the search for a style. It’s not least a gender myth more astute about men and women than that of Atalanta and Hippolytus (in any case, I always think Atalanta, like Bishop, should have won—she should have been provided with the apples, and Hippolytus, the ambitious, distractable male, goofed off in their pursuit, rather than the other way round). He is her anchor, she his kite.

Excerpted from “The Linebacker and the Dervish,” originally published in the January 2009 issue of Poetry magazine. Michael Hofmann’s most recent collection of poetry, Selected Poems (April 2009), was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is currently working on translations of Gottfried Benn. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Michael Hofmann. All rights reserved.

Does Billy Collins’s latest poetry collection leave readers laughing or frowning?

By William Logan
Poetry Media Service

Ballistics by Billy Collins. Random House, $24.00

Billy Collins is funny, everyone agrees. The birds agree, the bees agree, even the fish in the sea agree: Billy Collins is funny. Yet why do I feel, half an hour after closing a Billy Collins book, a sharp grinding in my stomach, as if I’ve eaten some fruit cake past its sell-by date? His wry, self-mocking poems wouldn’t hurt a fly—but they couldn’t kill a fly, either, even if they tried. Readers who have whetted their appetites for drollery on previous books may open Ballistics and be puzzled. Our Norman Rockwell of sly winks, and elbowing good humor, and straw-hatted, flannel-shirted American whimsy is no longer funny. Worse, some of his new poems take place in Paris.

Billy Collins’s method has been to borrow a dry nugget of fact or some mildly absurd observation and see how far he can go. Say you read that the people of Barcelona once owned an albino gorilla, or remember that Robert Frost said, “I have envied the four-moon planet,” or find yourself talking to a dog about the future of America. Why, the poem would almost write itself! Collins’s gift was to make the poem a little odder than you expected. The problem with his new book is that the ideas are still there, but the poems have lost their sense of humor. Here’s what happens to that gorilla:

These locals called him Snowflake,
and here he has been mentioned again in print

in the hope of keeping his pallid flame alive
and helping him, despite his name, to endure
in this poem where he has found another cage.

Oh, Snowflake,
I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia—
its people, its history, its complex architecture—

no, you were the reason
I kept my light on late into the night
turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.

There must be a lot of comic things to say about albino gorillas, things that don’t require sentimental guff with a twitch of self-pity.

Say you recall the day Lassie died, when, after you finished your farm chores and ate your oatmeal, you drove to town and scanned the books in Olsen’s Emporium—and what books they were! An anthology of the Cavalier poets, The Pictorial History of Eton College, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po. Why, who knew? This is a send-up of Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”—the book titles mock his purchase of New World Writing (as he said, “to see what the poets/ in Ghana are doing”). But then what?

I’m leaning on the barn door back home
while my own collie, who looks a lot like her,
lies curled outside in a sunny patch
and all you can hear as the morning warms up
is the sound of the cows’ heavy breathing.

And that’s it. This labored parody of O’Hara’s famous ending (“I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of/ leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT/ while she whispered a song along the keyboard/ to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”) isn’t side-splitting at all. The premise has become just another excuse for softheaded mush—Collins doesn’t even get round to mentioning (SPOILER ALERT!) that Lassie was played by any number of dogs, that she was male (because males have glossier coats), and that, besides, Lassie is immortal and can’t ever die.

Collins has managed to be what he rarely was in the past—dull. The ending in many of these new poems falls flat, the speaker gazing at the moon or listening to a bird in hopes of revelation. If Billy Collins can’t joke about death, for example, well, who can? When he pokes fun at writers’ guides (“Never use the word suddenly just to create tension”), or of teachers who ask, “What is the poet trying to say?” he’s still our best poet at piercing the pretensions of the whole literary shebang. Get him off the subject, however, and the poems are suffused with mild gloom and misanthropy.

When comedians stop being funny, they must invent themselves anew or retire for good. A number of poems here mention divorce in a roundabout way, reason enough for a man to take off his rose-colored glasses and book a flight to Paris. Indeed, the most hilarious poem in the book is titled “Divorce,” and it’s also the shortest:

Once, two spoons in bed,
now tined forks

across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.

If Collins can become the bitter philosopher of such lines, there’s hope yet. Otherwise, Poetry must do what Poetry does when a poet runs out of gas, or screws the pooch, or jumps the shark—give him a Pulitzer and show him the door.

William Logan’s most recent book of criticism is Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue.  His new poetry collection, Strange Flesh, appeared last fall. This review first appeared in The New Criterion. Read more about Billy Collins, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by William Logan. All rights reserved.

Jennifer Moxley’s new book of poems, Clampdown, confronts the domestic with a disclosing eye.

By Ange Mlinko
Poetry Media Service

Clampdown, by Jennifer Moxley. Flood Editions, $14.95.

In 1996, when Jennifer Moxley’s first book, Imagination Verses, was published to underground acclaim, the prevailing story was that, like the return of the repressed, the personal lyric had been reborn from the chance encounter of a girl genius and a violently anti-lyrical avant-garde. Imagination Verses was almost old-fashioned—full of love poems and soliloquies. But Moxley’s ear was decidedly trained by writers outside the mainstream anthologies: not Elizabeth Bishop or Sylvia Plath but experimental small-press poets like Bernadette Mayer and Rae Armantrout.

Now some may see Moxley as a harbinger of the big poetic trend of the 2000s, sometimes known as “lyric postmodernism” or “hybrid poetics.” This is a genre that has embraced the subjective “I” while rejecting the confessional voice; at the same time, it has appropriated the house style of the avant-garde, acute fracture and abstraction, while shedding its political baggage. What serves as content, finally, is language that speaks itself, an oracle mediating between poet and world, individual and history. It’s the very definition of poetry set out by Theodor Adorno in his 1957 essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” We are concerned, he said, “not with the poet as a private person, not with his psychology or his so-called social perspective, but with the poem as a philosophical sundial telling the time of history.”

Moxley knows her Adorno. The follow-up to Imagination Verses was a chapbook called Wrong Life, a title cribbed from Adorno’s famous aperçu: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” Much of Moxley’s work can be read in the light of this damning little sentence and the chapter it punctuates in Minima Moralia, “Refuge for the Homeless.” Moxley’s ethical anxieties emanate from a central unease, unease at home, and ripple out to touch nation, earth, and cosmos. But unlike the legions of poets who now adopt (and inevitably flatten) an Adornian mode of lyric, Moxley does not sublimate her psychology and social perspective.

Clampdown, her new collection of poems, is startlingly particular, privacy-shattering, and abject. It isn’t postmodern or experimental or hybrid, and parts of it aren’t even very lyrical—often she tones down her flights of gorgeous language to speak precisely and discursively, as if face to face with an interlocutor. Never uncontrolled, never artless, and never not in command of rhetoric, Moxley has written a book that could be available to a wide readership. Her expressive clarity, however, lures us into a universe of such self-doubt and self-cancellations that we find ourselves again, dialectically, in the company of Adorno: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.” From “The Price of Silence”:

It is suffocating beneath this vinyl window,
in whose fake glued-on mullions we see a cross.
But it doesn’t mean anything. No word
can be uttered or kept in store to chant us
out of losing. The whir of the washing machine
as it pours detergent down the sewer pipes,
chlorine rising up from the drains, The compact
fluorescent bulb in the gooseneck lamp
with a broken spring neither mutters
nor sputters playfully. Things don’t speak
our distance. The phone, though loud, tinny,
and insistent, cannot, it seems, be found.
We oppress in a way we cannot pay for
in any direct or meaningful way. All is fake.

Why should we awake?

Clampdown takes its title from a song on the Clash’s London Calling (“When we’re working for the clampdown/We will teach our twisted speech/To the young believers”). Its doubt-ridden angst, though, is more neoliberal-era Radiohead than post-punk Clash. This is not party music for the Revolution; it’s part “Karma Police,” part “The Bends,” Thom Yorke elegiacally singing “I wish it were the sixties/I wish we could be happy.” “The Price of Silence,” like other poems in the book—”Mother Night,” “These Yearly Returns,” “Friday Night, Candles Out”—puts Moxley’s comfortable home and habits on display in a ritual of self-mockery and pathos.

For the past fifty years, confessional poetry has permitted us the luxury of oversharing—mostly about our sex lives and our parents—in a sentimental gesture ultimately meant to reconcile and heal. Free verse has been confessional poetry’s de facto medium. A supple artifice in the hands of William Carlos Williams or Gregory Corso or Sylvia Plath, free verse has degenerated over the years into a style of no style, a sort of broken vernacular prose, as if language could be as transparent as a glass pane, the better to signal one’s sincerity and truthfulness. The resulting poem substitutes personality for art, supposedly sounding “natural” or “speechlike.”

The arc of Moxley’s work—from Often Capital, written while she was in her early 20s, through Imagination Verses, The Sense Record, The Line, and finally Clampdown—works heroically against the obstacle of “natural” voice. On a first reading, Moxley sounds utterly disconcerting, as if she were writing to you on the heels of a marathon session of retyping the poems of William Wordsworth or Thomas Hardy. From “The Yield”:

A thumb of silvery fur ensnared
my visual stupor: it was a mouse
scooting across the perilous ground
that lay between the rustic lean-tos
of brittle nut-brown maple leaves.
Image-gripped, but how to name it,
this will to live in little things?
Upon such monumental nerve
we build and break our wage.

The net effect of Moxley’s strange style has often been to foreground the sexiness of language and the poet, but their awkwardness too; it’s a style that cultivates and explores the notion of wrong life. For to write in one’s “natural” speaking voice already presupposes eloquence and fluency, and fluency presupposes ease. Moxley is definitely not at ease, either in her body or this country or century. She is in the wrong life, which cannot be written rightly. Thus she reconstructs another language—both yearning and alienated. In Clampdown it is a language in which she can confess her doubt and despair about the “chlorine rising up from the drains,” the fluorescent bulbs, the nylon bedspreads of the middle-class bedroom, the fake plastic trees. Moxley’s unmasking of American bounty as actual impoverishment thus has a lyric equivalent: the unmasking of the usual seductions and blandishments of the poem as an upmarket ad for metaphysical comforts. That she sets her personal theater against the backdrop of the world stage may seem like a grandiose gesture, but it is a necessary one. The figure she cuts is as erect and austere as a gnomon; the shadow she casts will be long.

Ange Mlinko is the recipient of the 2009 Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism. Her latest book of poems is Starred Wire. This article first appeared in the Nation. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Ange Mlinko. All rights reserved.

William Logan reviews Thom Gunn’s Selected Poems.

By William Logan
Poetry Media Service

Selected Poems, by Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $14.00.

In the 1940s and 1950s, it was almost an act of rebellion to compose tidy stanzas and tidier rhymes, as if the modernists had never existed. The influence of Auden and Yeats (those most seditious of seditious poets) was so overpowering on both sides of the Atlantic that an ideological mustiness soon pervaded the poetry magazines, as young poets wrote endless allegorical stanzas on Orpheus, or Achilles, or just about any Greek god or hero you could name. A few of these poems were brilliant; many were good; but the mass proved just period sludge, the sort any age produces—most of it to be washed away on the next tide of fashion. Thom Gunn could write in this headmaster’s manner with the best of them.

The huge wound in my head began to heal
About the beginning of the seventh week.
Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:
For joy I did not move and dared not speak,
Not doctors would cure it, but time, its patient skill.

And constantly my mind returned to Troy.

Gunn’s early books, Fighting Terms (1954) and The Sense of Movement (1957), announced a talent for emotion controlled in muscular, labyrinthine forms. His elegance had a brutish edge, and his brutality concealed a few civilities (his cachet as a young poet came from writing formal poems on bikers and Elvis). It should have been no great surprise when shortly after his first book he moved to California and took up study with Yvor Winters.

Selected Poems reveals how long Gunn labored to overcome the limitations of his virtues. If his early poems seem fussy now, polished into artificial antiquity, the over-heated poems on surfers and LSD are simply embarrassing. (The whole of “Listening to Jefferson Airplane” reads “The music comes and goes on the wind,/ Comes and goes on the brain.”) Gunn’s best work had to fend off Winters in his smugness and rectitude on one hand and San Francisco’s beatniks and hippies on the other, but he never stopped trying to treat the incompatible realms of his experience as if they formed a whole.

August Kleinzahler, who edited this volume, has made a judicious and surprisingly conservative selection of Gunn’s poems. Though he might have been more generous to the early books—only half a dozen poems survive—the most motheaten poems are gone, but so are later poems using the scatty lines of the Beats. I don’t miss the loose-limbed verse of Gunn’s middle period, or the poems that mentioned Ding Dongs or Charles Manson—or the one from the point of view of a dog. This selection stresses the reasoned continuity of Gunn’s work, evident in his formal poetry until the end. (Even late, he could make a lot of metaphysical hay out of a nasturtium found in a vacant lot.) What remain are, for the most part, the poems that take serious things seriously, culminating in the elegies he wrote during the AIDS outbreak of the 1980s. Gunn’s late poems were often bleak, haunted by losses to time and disease, by the slow recession of pleasure. After the completion of Boss Cupid (2000), he seems to have published nothing new before his death in 2004.

You’d hardly know from his poems that Gunn ever worked a day—he took as his gravitating theme a hedonism never wholly gratified. He loved the tightly knit stanzas and clockwork rhymes of the late Elizabethans. “I want to be an Elizabethan poet,” he once said, but there’s a great difference between being and imitation. In some ways, he was the thinking man’s Stephen Spender, his rude couplet about Spender notwithstanding. Gunn was a poet for whom feeling blossomed through form (his motto might have been Eliot’s remark that a “thought to Donne was an experience”); but he needed the resistance of pattern, the refined difficulty in the made thing. If the cost was too many early poems that began with lines like “Do not enquire from the centurion nodding” or “Lictor or heavy slave would wear it best,” and too many gassy stretches of couplet writing, the benefit was the stately movement he could give the passing of passing fancies:

Why should that matter? Why pretend
Love must accompany erection?
This is a momentary affection,
A curiosity bound to end,

Which as good-humored muscle may
Against the muscle try its strength
—Exhausted into sleep at length—
And will not last long into day.

Shakespeare and Donne would have recognized that cool detachment, and Dante approved Gunn’s vision of the afterlife, where the dead watch the living on black-and-white TV.

William Logan’s most recent book of criticism is Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue. His new poetry collection, Strange Flesh, appeared last fall. This review first appeared in the New Criterion. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by William Logan. All rights reserved.

John Koethe on Henri Cole’s Blackbird and Wolf, winner of the 2009 Lenore Marshall Prize.

By John Koethe
Poetry Media Service

Blackbird and Wolf, by Henri Cole. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $13.00.

To appreciate what’s so distinctive about Henri Cole’s Blackbird and Wolf, it helps to have a sense of his development as a poet, for more than any other I can think of, he has remade himself over the course of a career leading to this, his sixth book. His first two books, The Marble Queen and The Zoo Wheel of Knowledge, were mandarin performances, full of highly polished verse conspicuous for its sheer artfulness, exhibiting a delicacy and a mental and linguistic dexterity somewhat reminiscent of James Merrill. But starting with some of the poems in the 1995 The Look of Things and continuing with the harshly direct poems in The Visible Man and the equally direct though somewhat mellower poems in Middle Earth, Cole developed a style and a sensibility, characterized by a relentless self-examination, almost diametrically opposed to those he began with, and which have reached full fruition in Blackbird and Wolf.

The poems in the book are as artful as those of anyone writing, but it’s an artfulness so subtle and skillful that they seem almost artless in their directness and simplicity, as in these lines from “Gravity and Center”:

I’m sorry I cannot say I love you when you say
you love me. The words, like moist fingers,
appear before me full of promise but then run away
to a narrow black room that is always dark,
where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold,
devouring the thing I feel.

The artfulness here reminds me a bit of Elizabeth Bishop in its invisibility (more so than, say, Robert Lowell, in whose work the effort too often shows), though certainly in style and subject matter Cole’s work is nothing like Bishop’s. The poem concludes with a kind of ars poetica:

I don’t want words to sever me from reality.
I don’t want to need them. I want nothing
to reveal feeling but feeling—as in freedom,
or the knowledge of peace in a realm beyond,
or the sound of water poured into a bowl.

This artful artlessness is not an end in itself, impressive though it is, but works in the service of what I’ve just indicated I take to be Cole’s true subject, the inward subjective self and its problematic relation to the objective external world of things and other people. One might call it confessional poetry, though that term seems increasingly quaint, and I prefer to think of it as autobiographical poetry that uses the raw materials of the poet’s life to fuel an intense exploration of the kind of self-consciousness Gerard Manley Hopkins describes when he writes “Nothing else in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this self being of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it, except so far as this, that other men to themselves have the same feeling. But this only multiplies the phenomena to be explained so far as they are like and do resemble. But to me there is no resemblance: searching nature I taste self at one tankard, that of my own being.”

What is so maddening and mysterious about individual consciousness is that it is utterly commonplace and ordinary and at the same time absolutely unique, as intimated by the passage from Hopkins quoted above or these lines from “Beach Walk”:

Later, I saw a boy, aroused and elated, beckoning from a dune.
Like me, he was alone. Something tumbled between us—
not quite emotion. I could see the pink
interior flesh of his eyes. “I got lost. Where am I?”
he asked, like a debt owed to death.

Poetry that puts an emphasis, as Cole’s does, on directness and the avoidance of comforting illusions and consolations inevitably raises questions about the relation between poetry and truth. But I think that worries about the truth of the poet’s discoveries and revelations are misplaced; what matters, it seems to me, about the thoughts expressed in poetry is not whether they’re literally true but whether the poet entertains and inhabits them in a convincing manner and whether the reader can enter into them along with him. Wittgenstein says in a related connection that “the importance of a true confession does not reside in its being a correct and certain report of a process. It resides rather in the special consequences which can be drawn from a confession whose truth is guaranteed by the special criteria of truthfulness.” Wittgenstein’s meaning is difficult and obscure, but I think it is in something like that sense that Henri Cole’s Blackbird and Wolf contains some of the most truthful poems in modern American poetry.

John Koethe’s newest book of poems is Ninety-Fifth Street. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and will spend the spring of 2010 at Princeton as the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry. This article originally appeared in the Nation. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by John Koethe. All rights reserved.

William Logan reviews Arda Collins’s debut poetry collection It Is Daylight, winner of the 2008 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

By William Logan
Poetry Media Service

It Is Daylight, by Arda Collins. Yale University Press, $16.00.

Arda Collins comes to her first book fully formed, and it’s a little scary. The title may be It Is Daylight, but the cover is black, and the title page is black—the Goths have at last taken over Yale University Press. Louise
Glück, who chose the book for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, provides an intimate, bemused introduction that finds a blood-tie from Collins to Berryman and Dickinson, those poets of airless self-dramatization. It might be more accurate to say that she’s a grown-up version of Wednesday Addams, the sort of girl happiest raising spiders or trying to electrocute her younger brother.

These poems take place in the happy, happy suburbs, so of course the unnamed speaker is miserable—if the Welcome Wagon were a hearse, she’d be overjoyed.

At last, terror has arrived.

Next door, the house has gone up in flames.

A woman runs from the burning wreck, her face smeared

with blood and ashes. She screams that her children are kidnapped.

It’s truly exciting, and what more would anyone ask?

The blood and ashes, those manifest signs of mourning and penitence, suggest an attention almost religious. In these affectless monologues, even the disasters are deadpan. (Collins has perhaps learned something from Anne Carson, our master of Keatonesque delivery.) The paranoia and numbness that infuse the poems create a world where the speaker doesn’t know how to respond to the terrible things that happen. Normality looks odd to her—”Nearby, a gathering of // wives are seated at a bamboo // table. They wear suits and dainty shoes // and little anguish veils across their faces. // They have expensive, sharp silverware.” Such portrayals of the lifelessness of the living (the dead, to her, are not dead—they’re just tanning) are delicious. When Collins goes too far, it’s a devastatingly funny too far—the ladies above “have handmade White House // and Pentagon salt-and-pepper shakers.”

Collins is a Nietzschean fatalist, yet the world is a mystery to her, a cipher that can never quite be decoded. It’s peculiar when a book’s tone and manner are riveting, but its content banal, though even banalities can have irresistible fascination.

I thought how god loves this place;

the grass was coming in, and the crocuses.

What if someone died, or got fired,

or vomited alone in the middle of the night?

The apartments were wood on the outside.

stained red like the color of a picnic table.

I was so ugly, I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to drive.

At first I thought she’d written, “It was so ugly,” but her wording is more telling. This flat deposition (for a lawsuit never to be concluded) shows Marianne Moore’s love for the minutiae of being. If Collins has none of Moore’s élan or her enchanted gift for description, the younger poet sees the world through strange eyes, and in them the old world is made new again. Our younger poets were born a hundred years after the moderns; no wonder the lessons of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens seem antediluvian, they’ve been so often absorbed and re-absorbed. (When you teach “In a Station of the Metro” now, you have to explain a lot about the Métro of 1914.) Collins, whatever her debts, has learned how to make the ordinary bear the sorrows of hell.

This poet is only dimly aware of her virtues. The book is far too long (though most first books would be stronger at half the length), and the poems become too comfortable with their stark monotone, their theatrical double-spacing, their fiercely prosaic line (Collins has a wicked sense of the demotic—”You go to your piano lesson. You // stink”). More is the enemy of better here. The occasional touch of run-of-the-mill surrealism makes some poems seem to lie on a spur line from the Ashbery factory. Sometimes the poems leave me baffled. (I don’t get the point of a long poem about a serial killer or a dreary prose poem about God and microwave ovens.) After ninety pages, even lack of affect becomes affectation.

Still, this creepy, irresistible book is a masterful debut. It’s impossible to know what Collins will do next, but more of the same would be tedious rather than unbearable. Louise Glück, comparing her to other poets, has apparently forgotten that the abrupt manner, the goggle-eyed guilelessness, and the bloodless tone (like that of a high-functioning victim of Asperger’s syndrome) were long ago patented by Glück herself. If the vampires of Twilight wrote poetry, it would be this sort of poetry—they long to fit in, too.

William Logan’s most recent book of criticism is Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue. His new poetry collection, Strange Flesh, appeared last fall. This review first appeared in The New Criterion. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by William Logan. All rights reserved.

In her memoir The Winter Sun, poet Fanny Howe explores the possibilities and impossibilities of a writer’s calling.

By Ange Mlinko
Poetry Media Service

The Winter Sun, by Fanny Howe. Graywolf Press, $15.00.

At the outset of The Winter Sun, an apologia for the writing life, Fanny Howe confesses, “Since early adolescence I have wanted to live the life of a poet. What this meant to me was a life outside the law; it would include disobedience and uprootedness. I would be at liberty to observe, drift, read, travel, take notes, converse with friends, and struggle with form.” The outlaw poet has a long lineage, from the Beats and Rimbaud back to the troubadours, and it doesn’t accommodate the vulnerabilities of womankind. What it would mean for Howe, born in the United States in 1940, to pursue a life of poetry and self-definition—without sacrificing eros and motherhood—unfolds in a series of essays that might take as its motto “lower limit: memoir, upper limit: lyric.” The Winter Sun is an indispensable companion to Howe’s last book of nonfiction prose, The Wedding Dress (2003). Both collections circle around the theme of word and life, the via negativa, in an increasingly positivistic and cynical world. She subtitles The Winter Sun “Notes on a Vocation” but states at the outset that hers is “a vocation that has no name,” collapsing the mystical and the literary, Simone Weil and Samuel Beckett.

Fanny Howe has written young adult novels and experimental fiction, but she is best known as a lyric poet of fragmentary serial works that call to mind Hölderlin and Dickinson. She is a reluctant memoirist, circling and digressing around a subject she finds difficult: herself. As a child, she remarks, “I was often mute in the background, sucking my thumb and daydreaming.” Howe’s background would turn any littérateur green: her father was Mark DeWolfe Howe, a law professor at Harvard descended from the illustrious Quincy family; her mother was Mary Manning, an Irish-born actress, writer, and general impresario of the arts in Cambridge. Life in that household was lively, sociable, and privileged, but it comes filtered through Howe’s introversion. Her prose is condensed and cadenced to imply silence and shadow. Nameless fears persist around the edges; her earliest memories were marked by her father’s absence while he served in World War II, then by the revelation of the concentration camps. “While we learned languages, poetry, science, and athletics, the prevailing social attitude was nihilist. Not officially so, not with reference to Nietzsche, but in the stirring cavities of decision making and imagination. Mass murder, global destruction, and genocide were idle topics.”

The child sensitive to these intimations of cynicism and apocalypse would grow into a rebellious adult. The Wedding Dress opens with a powerful testimony of her youthful marriage and separation from her husband, Carl Senna. They were activists in Boston during the busing crisis (Jonathan Kozol introduced them). After four years of increasingly tense relations, mirrored too perfectly by the tensions outside their door, they were divorced and she, a white single mother, had three interracial children to support in a climate of fear and unrest. “There were many women like me—born into white privilege but with no financial security, given a good education but no training for survival.” This crisis, and the example of her much-loved mother-in-law, a black woman from the South, precipitated Howe’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Howe is well aware of how highly her “invisible-faithful” Catholic values are esteemed by “materialist-skeptical” intellectuals. Bitingly she acknowledges that people like herself “annoy well-adjusted people because weakness is not meant to survive.” In pitting herself against the evo-devo celebration of competition that permeates our culture, Howe’s unorthodox Catholicism (she quotes liberation theologians) is just as countercultural today as her civil rights activism was in the 1960s.

Howe is fully comfortable neither with entertaining nor with instructing. Instead, her memoirs and meditations are driven by the revelation that “the future is only the past turned around to look at itself.” Like her daydreaming child self, she is bewildered by the demands of time, and finally doesn’t really acquiesce to them. She repeats the trope over and over again: “The future is only the past recognizing itself at another location.” “We move forward into a past that will be censored.” Her digressive, meditative form mirrors this conviction: meditations subvert the demands of linear narrative, modeling a life outside ordinary time.

So what are we, if we are indeed enlightened and well adjusted, supposed to make of a woman who holds incompetence as an exemplary value; who distrusts words but uses them specifically, in the age of Richard Dawkins, to trace experience back to God; who would rather “hide out” caring for children than “get to work!” à la Linda Hirshman?

I find that Howe’s essays clarify two contemporary issues. One: “The atheist is no less an inquirer than a believer,” she writes. “In living at all, she is no less a believer than an unbeliever” (emphasis mine). Hence Camus’s opening sentence in The Myth of Sisyphus, from 1942, is as pertinent as ever: “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” We must determine for ourselves a raison d’être; in this, as in everything else about Darwinian capitalism, we are on our own. (Howe reminds us that the sign over the gate to Buchenwald reads Jedem das Seine—”to each his own,” or, as she clarifies, everyone gets what he deserves.) In rejecting suicide, we are all creatures of faith.

Determining for ourselves a raison d’être is also, of course, the chief prerogative of those who choose the writing life, and the second issue, which Howe’s “Notes on a Vocation” clarifies, is the role of the poet in an age of widespread scientism that peremptorily decides what questions are worth asking and how best to answer them. Quoting Johann Metz, Howe advocates “rebellion against being partially described—be it by a science or by another person.” A poet—just by persisting in that weak, useless, embarrassing role—contests authoritarian definitions of the self. Until the suave proponents of Darwinian fitness and success can solve the problem of “living at all”; until such time as they can make us—mothers, fathers, children, poets—happy to be partially described, governed by those descriptions, we cannot do without Fanny Howe and this nameless, wide-open vocation.

Ange Mlinko is the recipient of the 2009 Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism. Her latest book of poems is Starred Wire. This article first appeared in The Nation. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation. Read more about Fanny Howe, and her poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by Ange Mlinko. All rights reserved.

William Logan reviews Arda Collins’s debut poetry collection It Is Daylight, winner of the 2008 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

By William Logan
Poetry Media Service

It Is Daylight, by Arda Collins. Yale University Press, $16.00.

Arda Collins comes to her first book fully formed, and it’s a little scary. The title may be It Is Daylight, but the cover is black, and the title page is black—the Goths have at last taken over Yale University Press. Louise
Glück, who chose the book for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, provides an intimate, bemused introduction that finds a blood-tie from Collins to Berryman and Dickinson, those poets of airless self-dramatization. It might be more accurate to say that she’s a grown-up version of Wednesday Addams, the sort of girl happiest raising spiders or trying to electrocute her younger brother.

These poems take place in the happy, happy suburbs, so of course the unnamed speaker is miserable—if the Welcome Wagon were a hearse, she’d be overjoyed.

At last, terror has arrived.

Next door, the house has gone up in flames.

A woman runs from the burning wreck, her face smeared

with blood and ashes. She screams that her children are kidnapped.

It’s truly exciting, and what more would anyone ask?

The blood and ashes, those manifest signs of mourning and penitence, suggest an attention almost religious. In these affectless monologues, even the disasters are deadpan. (Collins has perhaps learned something from Anne Carson, our master of Keatonesque delivery.) The paranoia and numbness that infuse the poems create a world where the speaker doesn’t know how to respond to the terrible things that happen. Normality looks odd to her—”Nearby, a gathering of // wives are seated at a bamboo // table. They wear suits and dainty shoes // and little anguish veils across their faces. // They have expensive, sharp silverware.” Such portrayals of the lifelessness of the living (the dead, to her, are not dead—they’re just tanning) are delicious. When Collins goes too far, it’s a devastatingly funny too far—the ladies above “have handmade White House // and Pentagon salt-and-pepper shakers.”

Collins is a Nietzschean fatalist, yet the world is a mystery to her, a cipher that can never quite be decoded. It’s peculiar when a book’s tone and manner are riveting, but its content banal, though even banalities can have irresistible fascination.

I thought how god loves this place;

the grass was coming in, and the crocuses.

What if someone died, or got fired,

or vomited alone in the middle of the night?

The apartments were wood on the outside.

stained red like the color of a picnic table.

I was so ugly, I wasn’t sure I’d even be able to drive.

At first I thought she’d written, “It was so ugly,” but her wording is more telling. This flat deposition (for a lawsuit never to be concluded) shows Marianne Moore’s love for the minutiae of being. If Collins has none of Moore’s élan or her enchanted gift for description, the younger poet sees the world through strange eyes, and in them the old world is made new again. Our younger poets were born a hundred years after the moderns; no wonder the lessons of Pound and Eliot and Moore and Stevens seem antediluvian, they’ve been so often absorbed and re-absorbed. (When you teach “In a Station of the Metro” now, you have to explain a lot about the Métro of 1914.) Collins, whatever her debts, has learned how to make the ordinary bear the sorrows of hell.

This poet is only dimly aware of her virtues. The book is far too long (though most first books would be stronger at half the length), and the poems become too comfortable with their stark monotone, their theatrical double-spacing, their fiercely prosaic line (Collins has a wicked sense of the demotic—”You go to your piano lesson. You // stink”). More is the enemy of better here. The occasional touch of run-of-the-mill surrealism makes some poems seem to lie on a spur line from the Ashbery factory. Sometimes the poems leave me baffled. (I don’t get the point of a long poem about a serial killer or a dreary prose poem about God and microwave ovens.) After ninety pages, even lack of affect becomes affectation.

Still, this creepy, irresistible book is a masterful debut. It’s impossible to know what Collins will do next, but more of the same would be tedious rather than unbearable. Louise Glück, comparing her to other poets, has apparently forgotten that the abrupt manner, the goggle-eyed guilelessness, and the bloodless tone (like that of a high-functioning victim of Asperger’s syndrome) were long ago patented by Glück herself. If the vampires of Twilight wrote poetry, it would be this sort of poetry—they long to fit in, too.

William Logan’s most recent book of criticism is Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue.  His new poetry collection, Strange Flesh, appeared last fall. This review first appeared in The New Criterion. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2009 by William Logan. All rights reserved.