No Snowflake Falls

Yemen--Afghanistan Redux?

2010-01-03T07:04:00.000-08:00

An article in today’s Washington Post discusses the failures of the United States with regard to al Qaeda in Yemen, yet the article, while dissecting missteps and mistakes (for example, the firing of a Hellfire missile that exploded a car carrying six al Qaeda suspects in eastern Yemen), does not address the larger component of the failure—a failure that marks most of our efforts in the international arena. By and large, as a nation, we do not demonstrate the capacity for an internationalist view, so our actions across the world are driven either by ignorance or disregard. Over the past century, perhaps only three presidents had any level of internationalist view—Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Bill Clinton.

With regard to al Qaeda, the blame must be placed where it almost entirely lies—with the Bush-Cheney (hereafter BC) administration. While (willful) inexperience may account for many of the administration’s early failures, most glaring is the complete surrender of policy to ideology, malfeasance, and opportunism. From the larger view, one might argue that the first two on this list were motivated primarily by the last. The determination to wage war on the cheap benefited such corporations as Halliburton (of which Cheney was CEO until he was tapped for the vice presidential slot on the Republican ticket), corporations which have not suffered from the economic meltdown of the past two years. Recent reports have suggested that as early as spring 2001 the BC administration bragged that they would have boots on the ground in Afghanistan by the fall. At the center of this was something near and dear to the hearts of both Bush and Cheney—petroleum, in particular oil pipelines like the Afghanistan Oil Pipeline, the proposed Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, and HBJ Pipeline—the latter associated with both Enron and Bechtel. (Enron, of course, was the disgraced corporation headed by “Kenny Boy” Lay, a Bush crony, and Bechtel, a company that once had Caspar Weinberger—Secretary of Defense under Reagan—as a vice president and for which Donald Rumsfeld—Secretary of Defense for BC—traveled to Iraq to negotiate a pipeline deal. The visually impaired could connect the dots.)

What we should have recognized after 9/11 was that our actions in the world—particularly in the Arab world—have consequences. This is not to excuse the inexcusable but to try to determine why al Qaeda exists. Our history—right on the heels of imperialist conquests by Western European nations, most notably, in the Muslim world, England—has trammeled native populations in order to line the coffers of large companies; imperialism once joined with capitalism would not recognize any limits to their greed. Anyone who’s read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has had a glimpse into practices that endured well into the twentieth century—well into today. What the general populace of Western nations do not see because of the mainstream gloss over genocide and pillage in the name of profit operating under the flag of nationalism is the disregard for and suffering of the indigenous peoples of such countries as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Because we do not see it, we think that Islamist extremists are merely insane—driven by a psychotic religion to wreak violence on innocent Americans. This, of course, serves the powers that be. Without this blind, we might demand accountability for our national actions, and a true accounting would not pass muster.

One sentence in the middle of the Post article pretty much sums up the problem: “Yemen is a conservative tribal society with deep sympathies for al-Qaeda’s core message of protecting Islam.” Yemen is not alone in this regard. Most Muslim nations are also conservative, and the people feel their greatest loyalty toward their tribe, not toward the nation. After all, most of these “nations” were determined by European imperial powers and bear no relationship to actual native affiliation. (This shouldn’t be that hard to imagine since the United States is rapidly becoming a nation whose allegiances are just that partisan and parochial.) What we see in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and the problem that will not go away, is that the successful internal applications of national power have derived from tribes or factions that have grown large and powerful enough to impose their will across the board. Once we toppled Saddam, there was nothing capable of filling the vacuum.

Sadly, the primary legacy of 9/11 is that it afforded the BC administration the cover to conduct its imperialist policy without recourse to other excuses. How much easier to justify invasions of targeted nations when they could claim national security and get away with little close oversight because of the national anger over an attack on our soil. Our actions, however, only increased the brand al Qaeda. We waged a War on Terror that we implicitly marketed as a war on Islam, when we were actually conducting a War for Profit. For ordinary Muslims, the last two were not easily separable because they were all too familiar with the profit motive and saw that, if not directly anti-Islam, it moved without regard or respect for their deepest held beliefs.

Consider whether an American retaliation into Yemen is the best action we could undertake. It will perhaps salve our national need for action, to put, as Toby Keith so succinctly sang, “a boot in [their] ass—it’s the American way.” On the flip side, it will just reinforce Muslim perceptions about America and American policy, insuring that al Qaeda will never have to look too far for more men willing to die the martyr’s death—whether or not they expect to see those 72 virgins.

From Hope to Nope

2009-12-23T08:31:00.000-08:00

Here we are, eleven months into the first term of the first African American president of the United States. A man who ran for office on a ticket of "hope" and "change," with just enough specificity so that he could claim victories if anything resembling the issue came to something and just enough vagueness so that he might erect a teflon shield against charges that he'd broken campaign promises. Hence, if anything--and I mean just about anything--resembling health care reform, he can belly-up and claim that he delivered.

The problem that Obama faces--one that he and his staff should've been savvy enough to anticipate--is that his biggest promises--hope and change--cannot be so easily quantified. He put on a winning ad campaign, but people believed him. They put aside the cynicism that they hold for ad campaigns in general (no one really expects that they'll get the sexy girl when they drink the beer or buy the car--at least no one over the age of 15) and political campaigns in particular. He became a brand with high recognition and high anticipation. Watching his campaign was like watching trailers for a great new high-budget special effects extravaganza heading for the multiplex on a holiday weekend.

Sadly, if hope cannot be quantified in terms of delivery, when we feel that our hopes have been betrayed, we get really, really mad. After courting progressives and the youth vote, Obama--they feel--has been fickle. He's jilted them. Prince Charming is just another Don Juan. (Perhaps that's an insult to Don Juan; from what we can gather, he at least left all of those women satisfied.)

I'm not so "evolved" that I'm beyond saying, "I told you so," especially since I dared to let myself get carried away and thought we might see something different. I was attentive to his vacuous campaign; I was aware that he was successful in Chicago politics--hardball and nasty. Still, after eight years of Bush and Cheney, I guess I was ready to think I might be able to vote for the Democrat, rather than just against the Republican.

I knew the game was over when he announced the appointment of Geithner to Treasury. That was it. A year ago--even before he took the oath of office--he declared that his entire campaign was null and void. He appointed a fatcat to restore our economy and manage the fatcats. The rest we can read for ourselves in the unemployment figures, the unabated foreclosures, and the stories of obscene corporate bonuses.

Whatever passes the Senate is not necessarily going to be better than nothing, and the hope that the Senate will be able to tinker it into shape belies the facts of how that "august" body works these days. We can hope that what emerges from the reconciliation of the House package with the Senate improves things. We did hope that Obama would lead the charge on this issue, too, and we see how well that worked out.

Some Thoughts on the Death of Michael Jackson

2009-06-28T08:34:00.000-07:00

I suppose I should begin by apologizing to the millions of people I’m about to insult, because my confusion regarding Michael Jackson has little to do with him and much to do with the level of public grief surrounding his death. I’ll readily admit that I also never really understood similar reactions to the deaths of Elvis, John Lennon, or Kurt Cobain. Of these, only John Lennon can be said to represent anything beyond his popularity as a performer; Lennon was an outspoken crusader for peace, but what actual effect his music and crusading had on the war in Vietnam, or anywhere else, is purely speculative.

As I think about “celebrities” whose deaths moved me, I really can up with only three, and they were less celebrities than public figures—JFK, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. These men actively sought change, though in JFK’s case his effect was probably more mythological than actual, even during his brief presidency; LBJ accomplished significantly more, both in constructive and destructive ways, than Kennedy. I was eleven when JFK was assassinated reacted more from shock than a sense of genuine loss. Five years later, I was deeply affected by the assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy. By then, I was able to appreciate both what they had achieved and what they might have been able to achieve. This goes far beyond musical performance.

In terms of musical contribution, of the four performers I mentioned, Cobain was the only one in the midst of his career. At the time of his death, Michael Jackson was staging a circus that might be variously regarded as a comeback or an exit, but nothing I’ve heard about the tour suggests he was breaking new ground. In fact, it’s likely that the pharmaceutical cocktail he was being given to help him make it through the ordeal killed him.

The performer who excited so many had been dead for almost two decades. As The Onion noted, the very talented boy singer effectively died at the age of twelve. What remained was a man who was insulated enough by wealth and fame, which equates to power, to indulge his troubled psyche in ways that made his real life as bizarre as a tabloid fantasy. When his behavior included the reckless display of a infant from a balcony, he let the world glimpse the Dorian Gray portrait of what he was, though with his repeated facial reconstructions, he actually displayed the depth of his troubled mind for everyone to see.

And then there are the children. While it’s true he was never convicted of “actual” molestation, that’s really beside the point. His behavior with those boys was inappropriate and irresponsible, even if the only crotch he ever grabbed was his own. Of course those surrounding Jackson and the boys’ share in that responsibility, but that doesn’t diminish Jackson’s actions. An adult man who brings boys into his bed, regardless of whether or not he went beyond “harmless” horseplay, is endangering those boys’ wellbeing. If anyone wishes to argue that he didn’t understand how inappropriate his actions were, well, then he fits the legal definition of insanity—someone who doesn’t understand the difference between right and wrong by virtue of mental defect.

That he himself suffered a childhood abusive apparently in many ways provides an explanation, not an excuse. Statistically, an overwhelming number of pedophiles (and serial killers) were victims of childhood abuse. That doesn’t mitigate their actions or change the fact that their brains were rewired so that they cannot stop. Chemical castration is no solution. If the real penis no longer works, they can—and do—resort to phallic surrogates.

I was touched inappropriately when I was a boy. He was a member of my church five or six years older than I was, and my mother encouraged the “friendship” because he seemed such a nice, religious boy. Perhaps I was the first boy he’d actually gotten enough nerve to touch, but both times he grabbed at my crotch, I pulled away, and he didn’t pursue. Later, the boys he molested were not so lucky. I’m sure their mothers thought he was a nice, religious man. I was almost fifty when I realized—emotionally realized—what these acts were. We can disguise and conceal from ourselves for a long time the effects of what might seem at the moment insignificant and harmless acts, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t traumatic. We will probably never know whether Jackson’s misguided attempts to reinvent his own childhood through the surrogacy of the boys he “befriended” will have a pronounced effect on any of these boys. It might be years before they realize it.

So I suppose I wonder whether a sick man who sings and dances warrants the kind of accolades tossed his way upon his death. Was he so “artistically” gifted, a “genius” whose manifested disturbance he put on big-screen media display, that we can say that the other part of his life is something we can ignore or excuse because, well, everyone knows geniuses are misfits, and, hey, nobody ever proved he did anything really, truly wrong?

Forgive me if I don’t think being a victim constitutes an excuse. And forgive me if I don’t applaud.

The Year in Poetry 1993

2009-04-27T08:15:00.000-07:00

In preparing to review the year in poetry, I find myself struggling against the impulse to launch a full-blown jeremiad deploring triviality, posturing, limitations of craft and imagination, and self-indulgence. All this in a year marked by the publication of new and collected or selected works by quite a few luminaries, yet rarely has a firmament been so dimly lit by so many dull stars. Of the seventeen poets herein reviewed, eleven are (if just barely) in their sixties or seventies, yet those poets in their forties show, on the whole, much stronger work. Symptomatically, the National Book Award has, for a second consecutive year, slighted three nominees of demonstrably higher merit than the winner. (Whatever might be made of it, last year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize went to the two volumes singled out here as best: Hayden Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems and Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, respectively.) With Carruth’s Collected Longer Poems and Jack Gilbert’s new collection, The Great Fires, slated for spring release, 1994, at least, is getting off to a promising start.

Readers interested in exploring root causes for the current condition of poetry will find explicit suggestions as well as thoughtful analysis that provides a springboard for inference in Alan Shapiro’s In Praise of the Impure, subtitled Poetry and the Ethical Imagination: Essays, 1980-1991. In essays that range from general topics—narrative, new formalism, and the living tradition, to reduce them to capsule summaries—to balanced readings of individual poets including J.V. Cunningham, Robert Hass, and John Berryman, Shapiro considers poetry not as literary play detached from our lives but regards style as “consciousness in action” and stresses “the second life of poetry” (a term taken from Eugenio Montale), “the life it takes on in us years after our initial reading, when it coalesces with some unforeseen experience, when some occasion suddenly recalls it, and it comes to us bearing its gift of revelation.” For a poem to carry that “gift,” however, it must be grounded inknowledge of the world; a clear, organic sense of form (not rhyme and meter merely flourished as “a badge of affiliation”); and a willingness to extend the imagination to ethical concerns.

Individual essays on the “ethical imagination” (“Flexible Rule,” from which the above quote is taken) and the use of form in poetry (“The New Formalism” and “Some Notes on Free Verse and Meter”) are exemplary in their balance; while Shapiro champions specific poets, there is no suggestion that poets treated less flatteringly are victims of grudge-match mentality. Those new formalists whose poems suggest a belief “that the erection of a metrical frame around a subject [is] all the imaginative work they [have] to do” might disagree, but Shapiro presents a convincing analysis for why so much new formalist poetry seems so shallow: “The crude management of form can render only crude overgeneralized emotions.”

Finally, an essay that should be required reading for all students, instructors, and administrators in creative writing programs, “Horace and the Reformation of Creative Writing” goes a long way to explain our current penury. In earlier societies, the education of poets was a lengthy process; Irish master bards, for example,

had to pass through a very rigorous twelve-year course of training, encompassing not only the study of prosody and the memorization of allthe tales and poems of the nation, but also, among other things, the mastery of history, music, law, science, and divination. His was a poetry inextricably bound up with the realities of social and political life.

Against this, Shapiro contrasts contemporary two-year MFA programs with lax, almost non-existent curricular demands, which promote an approach to the teaching of writing—and, one might hazard, the product of such instruction—”in which vagueness and mystification pass for knowledge.” Both Donald Hall i”Poetry and Ambition” and Dana Gioia in “Can Poetry Matter?” have covered much of this territory, but Shapiro, writing from an insider’s perspective, is both more specific and more lacerating in his assessments. In this unlikely culture medium, what can we expect will grow?

Of the new collections by prominent “elder” poets, Donald Hall’s The Museum of Clear Ideas seems overall the most satisfying. In this, his eleventh collection in 38 years, he demonstrates a lifetime’s mastery of poetic craft. Every poem in the collection is written in syllabics, yet the lines rarely call attention to their strict metric. The form is most visible in the extended sequences “Baseball” and “Extra Innings,” where nine-syllable lines accumulate in nine-line stanzas through the first sequence, gaining one syllable per line and one line per stanza in the succeeding three “Extra Innings.” Even here, the line breaks do not seem forced or the lines padded to fulfill the form, a frequent failing of syllabic verse. Despite felicities of craft, the volume does not equal Hall’s major achievement to date, the book-length The One Day (1988), nor is it as emotionally satisfying as either Kicking the Leaves (1978) or The Happy Man (1986).

In three of four sections, Hall employs strategies of distancing. The two sequences of “Baseball” poems, for instance, are addressed to Dada collagist Kurt Schwitters. The sequences begin from the premise of explaining the sport but piece together fragments of various concerns into a verbal “collage,” including daily life on the speaker’s farm and, most movingly, the struggles arising from Hall’s and Jane Kenyon’s medical crises (documented in Hall’s marvellous book-length essay, Life Work, published by Beacon Press also in 1993; it serves as a wonderful companion volume to these as well as earlier poems by Hall). This approach, however, defuses the emotional gain of the material, both through an almost surrealistic juxtaposition of situation and image and the cavalier, almost Ashbery-like tone of the speaker.

The title sequence, subtitled “Or say: Horsecollar’s Odes,” poses different problems. Each of these poems, an endnote informs us, takes “the number and shape of stanzas in Horace’s first book of odes”; names of characters seem derived from the same source (Flaccus, Glaucus, Sabina) or from neo-classical models (Camilla and Julia). Many of the poems conclude with an answering coda, the “Or say” of the subtitle, as with “O Camilla, Is It”:

O Camilla, is it conceivable that

you feel as ardent as I do—as horny

as seven goats? Camilla, let us hurry

out of these grossly

getting-in-the-way clothes onto a wide bed

with its covers hurled off to play skin-music

on bright sheets, slowly increasing the tempo

until Eden comes.

Or say: At this moment, according to habit,

Horsecollar interrupts his ode to contradict

his ode; or calls upon Professor Zero to sneer

at Horsecollar, at hypocritical humanity, and at

Professor Zero. Analysands cherish reversals

in the performance of Heraclitean understanding

achieved after eight years on a Viennese sofa;

Horsecollar revels in luxuries of antithesis,

by which any Eden, temperate with blessedness,

freezes forever in the flames of coldest hell.

In many respects this sequence resembles “Four Classic Texts” from The One Day; the bracketing sections of that poem, however, offer a grounding context, and the use of biblical as well as classical models provides a necessary balance and corrective. The problem here seems a question of tone. Horace’s odes, like other classical and neo-classical works, rely on a shared sense of social conviction and convention, even if shared only by an elite. Today, such sharedsensibility seems impossible, and, without that seedbed, poems in that manner can seem, rather than biting and satirical, merely arch. While some of these poems find the self-deprecating balance requisite for satire (“Let Many Bad Poets” comes to mind), this does not happen consistently enough to make the sequence fully rewarding.

The most satisfying of the sections, “Another Elegy,” memorializes a fictional poet who seems a composite of Hall and his contemporaries. Divorce, separation from children, political activity, and reliance on drink surface as generational problems which the fictitious Bill Trout has faced and, in most cases, surmounted. In many ways, the elegy celebrates a generation of poets who succeeded in surviving in ways the previous generation—Jarrell, Roethke, Lowell, and Berryman—never managed. Yet the poem descends into neither self-pity nor self-congratulation, managing an evenness of intimacy and objectivity comparable to that in The One Day. Consider this passage from near the end, involving the narrator, Trout, and his third wife, a Bengali dancer:

Each year

his death grows older. Outside this house, past Kearsarge

changing from pink and lavender through blue and white

to green, public language ridicules “eager pursuit of honor.”

Do I tell lies? “...in middle age he fell in love...”

Did he never again tremble from chair to table? At night

Bill delivered his imagination and study to Laverne

and Shirley, laughing when a laughtrack bullied him

to laugh—while Reba groaned an incredulous Bengali groan—

in order not to drink.

Yet again he walked in a blue

robe in detox, love’s anguish and anger walking beside him.

The easy shift between the personal and the public, as well as the elegiac and the playful, and the firm sense of line mark the work of a master. Had Hall extended emotional as well as formal satisfaction through the book, he might have equalled or even surpassed his best

W.S. Merwin uses syllabics, as well as regular stanzas and occasional rhyme, far less successfully in Travels, his thirteenth collection; the effect, given his now-typical lack of capitalization and punctuation, is often confusing. Take, for example, these opening stanzas from “Another Place”:

When years without number

like days of another summer

had turned into air there

once more was a street that had never

forgotten the eyes of its child

not so long by then of course nor

so tall or dark anywhere

with the same store at the corner

sunk deeper into its odor

of bananas and ice cream

still hoarding the sound of roller

skates crossing the cupped board floor

but the sidewalk flagstones were

cemented and the street car

tracks buried under a late

surface...

And so on for eleven pages. Individual lines and passages are striking, but a reader must redact to make sense of this. In the third line, for instance, is “there” part of the preceding lines or the lines that follow? Line endings bear no particular weight; the first two lines seem clearly self-contained units, and the first stanza itself seems a complete syntactical unit. But what about the radically enjambed first line of the third stanza, and the final line of that stanza which runs over into the next? Extended narrative is equally problematic; as in his early volumes, Merwin seems more interested in the play of language over image than in developing a clear plot to guide through diversion and distraction. Most successful are the handful of short lyrics at the very end, including “Rain Travel” and “After the Spring,” close to the best poems in perhaps his finest collection, The Rain in the Trees (1988).

Merwin’s struggle to shed the conventional style of his first collections is chronicled in The Second Four Books of Poems, which reissues The Moving Target, The Lice, The Carrier of Ladders, and Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, those volumes in which he developed his mature manner. The ability to cast unpunctuated language over lines so that syntactic values are rarely obscured, a facility shared by Gary Snyder and Lucille Clifton, did not come easily to Merwin. This may account for why so many of the poems in this omnibus seem repeated efforts to claim the same material. The bardic, shamanistic mode also seems an uneasy fit. Few of these poems are as satisfying as a handful from his earliest collections—”Burning the Cat,” for instance, or “The Drunk in the Furnace”—though his successes are usually brief lyrics, like “For the Anniversary of My Death”:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveler

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

Note the clear correlation between line and meaning, stanza and sentence. Yet the pleasures of such delicate lyrics are won by reading through too many pages of poems pitching toward the tone and not quite ringing it. Readers unfamiliar with Merwin’s earlier work would be better served by his (at times too) generous Selected Poems.

A more rewarding republication, Galway Kinnell’s Three Books contains revised versions of Body Rags, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, and The Past. Kinnell, a notorious tinkerer (rumor has it that The Book of Nightmares was extensively revised in galleys), notes in his introduction that most of the revisions are “simply deletions of ‘ill-written and extraneous material,’” including “...clotted conceits, fanciful elaborations, ...grandiloquence, redundancies, ...pointlessly elaborate sound effects, contrived usages, efforts to enliven through heightened language what would have been lively if given straight....” Most poems have been touched, if just a little, with notable gains. Students of Kinnell and of the poetic process will derive considerable interest and satisfaction in comparing these with the originals, as well as savoring them on their own merits.

Considerably less interesting and satisfying is Mark Strand’s Dark Harbor, his eighth collection. With some pretensions toward being a longish Stevensesque meditation, it seems instead more neo-surrealist posturing, at its worst descending into silliness, as in section XIX, in its entirety:

I go out and sit on my roof, hoping

That a creature from another planet will see me

And say, “There’s life on earth, definitely life;

“See that earthling on top of his home,

His manifold possessions under him,

Let’s name him after our planet.” Whoa!

Did even Pope in “Peri Bathous” imagine such sinking? Strand seems to provide an explanation for the poem in section XXXII: “The idea of being large is inconceivable.... The image of a god // ...[who] brings whole rooms, whole continents to light, / Like the sun, is not for us.” Doubtless he intends this to reflect on our social condition, but the poem is so sealed from any clear reference to the external world, the comment reflects nothing but the poem itself. Even in XLI, when Strand’s speaker, regarding “the distance of stars,” “wonder[s] if the physicist / Sees the same sky I do,” this brief and almost moving meditation on “mystery” is cut short with a gesture of hip dismissal: “Ah, who knows! We are already travelling faster than our / Apparent stillness can stand, and if it keeps up / You will be light-years away by the time I speak.” Such consistently flip evasion of responsibility marks a failing of ethical imagination, at the very least.

In section 4 of Garbage, A.R. Ammons wonders:

...is a poem about garbage garbage

or will this abstract, hollow junk seem beautiful

and necessary as just another offering to the

high assimilations...

Obviously, panelists for this year’s National Book Award picked door #2. In the first section, however, Ammons implies a different answer: “why should I // be trying to write my flattest poem, now, for / whom....” And who should hesitate to take him at his word? On the next page, at the end of a long, largely disconnected string of polysyllabics (each section links strings of phrases with colons and commas, only the first beginning with a capital letter, only the last ending with a period), parenthetically—and tellingly—Ammons wonders, “(hey, is the palaver rapping, yet?)” Though he may intend passages like this to seem droll and charming, too much of the poem, in fact, seems self-indulgent “palaver,” yakking at great lengths within the width of a spool of adding machine tape (thus the thoughtful line breaks) in order to hear himself think. This pretends to be “a scientific poem” but suffers, instead, from a scientific posturing that has flawed even more successful earlier poems like “Corsons Inlet.” Unlike in his best earlier poems, however, one can go pages without meeting anything resembling an image, and what else might one expect from a poet who offhandedly volunteers, 35 pages into a book called Garbage:

...I don’t know anything much about garbage

dumps: I mean, I’ve never climbed one: I

don’t know about the smells: do masks mask

scent: or is there a deodorizing mask...

For this, they passed over Hall’s The Museum of Clear Ideas, Mark Doty’s My Alexandria, and Margaret Gibson’s The Vigil (both reviewed later).

Although I had not heard of Shirley Kaufman before reading Rivers of Salt, her sixth collection of poems, I came away with considerable respect for her lyric ability. While these poems are not lengthy, overly discursive, or ponderously philosophical, their elegantly rendered observations of life in Jerusalem, memories of parents and children, and experiences while travelling contain more depth, detail, heart, and wisdom than Strand or Ammons even glimpse. Most poems set in the Middle East labor under the too easy weight of Importance they presume; a twenty-year resident of Jerusalem and witness to war, Kaufman’s point of view is not the political tourist’s. The details of “Waiting,” the opening poem of the volume, are those of the speaker’s daily life, yet even musings on the weather, waiting for an expected season of rain—”A few blurry showers in the north, / not in Jerusalem,” or “Last week clouds came, a dark insensible mass / above the hills, but nothing fell”—are heightened by more vaguely menacing passages: “We can’t do anything / but wait. Fear sticks to our minds / like the black lice of newsprint.” Only toward the end does that fear take solid form:

There are black rubber masks in our closet.

When you tighten the buckles

and smooth the rubber snugly over your face

and attach the filter according to the printed instructions,

you can breathe fresh air

for about six hours. That’s what they tell us.

These details, too, are commonplace. No histrionics, no assumed heroism: this is the voice of the Israelis who wait for more than rain to fall.

Along with fear, Kaufman provides tenderness, humor, and an eye for detail. Above all, she has a sense of human strengths and failings, and how the pleasures of one are not necessarily diminished by awareness of the other. In “Cineraria,” the speaker visits with an American expatriate while in Delhi and listens to his countercultural adventures on a porch “lined with pots of purple cineraria. / Little imperialist flowers / from my own back yard.... Once,” he tells her,

he went to visit

Ginsberg and Orlovsky

in Benares. He wanted

to talk about poetry,

but they kept asking him

about the Ganges. “Peter

served tea like a Hindu wife.”

Not exactly, I’m thinking.

Whatever we’re sharing only

seems the same.

In these few lines, Kaufman efficiently presents four characters and an entire milieu. And, however deflating the speaker’s assessment of her host, she continues to share a pleasant moment with him. Kaufman’s subjects rarely exceed the capacity of her craft, which, though not considerable, carries the necessary weight through an entirely pleasurable book.

Of the many collected and selected volumes published this year, five seem necessary to mention. The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer, John Haines’ collected poems, gathers poems from six previous collections and includes, in addition to a section of new poems, a selection of uncollected earlier poems. Haines’ early work is less widely known than that of two contemporaries with whom he shared influences and whose work his resembles—James Wright and Robert Bly—and that’s too bad, because Haines’ poems, while they may not achieve the heights of Wright at his best, do not descend into either the self-pity of Wright or the grating surreal polemics of Bly at their worst. Tu Fu, Li Po, and Georg Trakl are among the influences Haines acknowledges; of them, Trakl’s Expressionism colors the earlier poems most; the opening stanzas of “Moons,” from The Stone Harp (1971), are typical:

There are moons like continents,

diminishing to a white stone

softly smoking

in a fogbound ocean.

Equinoctial moons,

immense rainbarrels spilling

their yellow water.

Mixed with mystical realism are political poems, poems more firmly grounded in the Alaskan landscape, and cleanly detailed poems about wildlife.

Two thirds of the way through the volume, beginning with New Poems 1980-88 (1990), Haines’ canvas enlarges and his style achieves greater variety. These poems draw considerably on art history and refer to the works of such artists as Hieronymus Bosch, Auguste Rodin, Goya, and Michelangelo, as well as to science, literature, and history. Many take the form of monologues in the voices of historical figures and extend his tonal range to the colloquial. The closing stanzas of “Diminishing Credo,” a poem addressed to Eugene Delacroix, give a sense of the later work:

Under your hand for one last time

the animal torso quickened,

aroused from sleep to fury;

and with you also an old dream

of the barricades flickered

and the map of history vanished.

It was the time of the photographer

and his flat, grey field,

the time of ascending balloons...

This poem treats the same sense of diminishment as the section of Strand’s Dark Harbor quoted above, but Haines’ choice of a specific historical moment and figure to embody that sense of loss provides a context that lends depth to the expression of loss—a depth that gains, as well, from the wonderfully ironic image of optimism in the final line. Those unfamiliar with Haines’ most recent poems will particularly find this collection frequently rewarding.

Less rewarding is The Darkness Around Us Is Deep, William Stafford’s selected poems, edited and with an introduction by Robert Bly. Most of the poems here are brief lyrics, built from relatively simple, declarative sentences in Stafford’s trademark flat diction. “Near” reveals much about the style:

Walking along in this not quite prose way

we both know it is not quite prose we speak,

and it is time to notice this intolerable snow

innumerably touching, before we sink.

It is time to notice, I say, the freezing snow

hesitating toward us from its gray heaven;

listen—it is falling not quite silently

and under it still you and I are walking.

Maybe there are trumpets in the houses we pass

and a redbird watching from an evergreen—

but nothing will happen until we pause

to flame what we know, before any signal’s given.

The first lines describe the style with almost embarrassing accuracy. And, though Stafford is often regarded as a poet of “place,” this poem, like many of those selected, despite occasional place names, occurs in a limbo-land of almost-detail (“redbird,” not cardinal or scarlet tanager, for instance; “evergreen,” not pine or cedar). Even the relationship between speaker and addressed remains undefined. Yet Stafford builds a sense of importance through rhetoric—”it is time to notice this intolerable snow / innumerably touching, before we sink.” What makes the snow intolerable? Who or what is innumerably touching? Sink into what?—questions a good writing teacher would ask. Then, he heightens the flat diction through repetition and urgent iteration: “It istime to notice, I say, the freezing snow....” These hardly seem the masterstrokes of a poet whom Bly would name a national treasure.

The limits of Stafford’s talent, or at least the modest uses to which he put it, are clearly demonstrated in this volume. Bly’s editing, moreover, has done the work no great service. Poems are selected and gathered in sections that seem designed to domesticate Stafford to Bly’s usual esthetic agenda, and no apparatus is provided to give any sense of chronology. Hence, readers lose any sense of how Stafford’s style has progressed, particularly unfortunate since the poems are similar enough to seem gathered from two books published in close proximity rather than from eight volumes published over thirty years.

In contrast, Robert Bertholf’s edition of Robert Duncan’s Selected Poems provides a brief but useful introduction and gathers both uncollected and previously issued poems chronologically by either date of composition or publication, respectively. He has succeeded admirably, as well, in representing the variety of Duncan’s stylistic, prosodic, and thematic concerns in a reasonably sized volume. The extent of Duncan’s intelligence, erudition, and formal expertise cannot be demonstrated in a brief notice, and probably do not need to be. Readers unfamiliar with his work apart from the few anthologized pieces should avail themselves of this fairly inexpensive edition.

Fewer readers will be familiar with the work of Jane Cooper, gathered in Scaffolding: Selected Poems. The volume collects work from the late forties and fifties (unpublished until her 1974 collection, Maps & Windows) through to 1983 (when the book was originally assembled for British publication). Additionally, she includes an essay, “Nothing Has Been Used inthe Manufacture of This Poetry That Could Have Been Used in the Manufacture of Bread,” which explains her long delay publishing her earliest poems and offers a revealing glimpse of the social constraints experienced by women writers immediately after the Second World War. These poems are not unusual for the period, characterized by compression of statement, mythical reference, and personal distance, but many are strong examples of the period style, and, at their best, transcend that style. This passage from an unfinished crown of sonnets, “After the Bomb Tests,” moves backward from the Bikini atomic tests to consider the origins of the nuclear age in the discoveries of Johannes Kepler:

I walk out of the house into the still air,

Moving from circle to circle—hot, cold,

Like zones of water this October night.

All the stars are still arranged in spheres,

The planets stalk serenely. Thinking of Kepler

I pick a grassblade, chew it up, then spit.

Now I have thought, he said, the thoughts of God.

Other poems concern felt obligations of motherhood, made complex in “Mercator’s World,” wherein a distorted projection map may make navigation easier but blurs a sense of actual distance and proportion, and the tensions of sexual relations in a newly liberated world.

Through the sixties and seventies, Cooper loosened her meter and tightened her language. The most recent poems show considerable formal reach, especially in the sequence involving the incarceration of Rosa Luxemburg, “Threads.” Based on Luxemburg’s letters to the wife of a fellow political prisoner in World War I Germany, the poem looks at the “threads” of the speaker’s concern—political repression and nature—as they twine and ravel, as in the opening passage of the second of three sections:

Hans is killed

Now twilight begins at four

N “broke the news”

Over the great paved courtyard

hundreds of rooks fly by with a rowing stroke

Such a parade of grief! Why can’t friends understand

I need solitude to consider? Why not tell me

quickly, briefly, simply

so as not to cheapen

Their homecoming caw,

throaty and muted is so different from their

sharp morning caw after food. As if metal balls,

tossed from one to the other, high in the air,

tinkled exchanging the day’s news

my last two letters

addressed to a dead man...

As is frequently the case, early schooling in metrics has given her a sharpened sense of how to shape a freer line. The diversity, craft, and attention to detail evinced in Cooper’s work, particularly in contrast to that of less practiced but more prominent poets, underscore the question of what standards we use to measure accomplishment.

John Engels’ work, fully represented in Walking to Cootehill: New and Selected Poems, 1958-1992, demonstrates a level of intelligence and craft similarly under-appreciated. Nearly half of the poems are new, enough to justify a book to themselves, so issuing them as part of a selected poems seems designed to consolidate his work with a new publisher. Given that decision, Engels has chosen to organize the poems thematically in two broad sections, “The Naming” and “The Unnaming,” mixing poems from his previous eight collections throughout. Each poem, however, includes the title and date of first book publication, allowing the reader to appreciate the through-lines of poetic concern while registering the ways in which Engels’ craft and concern have matured.

Engels’ poems are characterized by complexity of thought, reflected in dense, knotty syntax and a frequently Latinate vocabulary—Milton a rather ironic influence for a Catholic poet. Many of his poems also accumulate over considerable length, building detail on detail, but “The Naming,” from his 1981 collection, Vivaldi in Early Fall, gives a taste:

This is the kind of night

on which Yuan Chen cried out

to his dead wife, when one

dreams of another, are both

aware of it? the shadows lying close

in his bed, ice roaring

in the great river. From such a night

Adam himself awoke, knowing

none of this had ever been,

opened his eyes

onto the glorious mess of the contingent,

propped himself on one elbow,

and without astonishment gave names

to the bee-orchid, the giraffe.

The pressure to name the forces of nature, threatening as that roaring ice, which are part of “the glorious mess of the contingent,” impels much of Engels’ work, whether those forces be fire, rot, underground streams—whatever wreaks havoc with the orderly structures we impose on the universe. Those same forces take the form of the beautiful and exotic, even if commonplace, things of the world: blossoming tomatoes, the colors of flowers in spring or summer, and the necessary if fruitless task Engels undertakes in poem after poem, of trying to cope with the world through language.

Like Engels, Mark Doty brings considerable verbal resources and moral seriousness to bear on his subjects. My Alexandria, his third collection, extends the scope of his narratives to engage questions of mortality. Awareness of AIDS pervades the poems, whether they deal directly with the disease or not. Beginning with poems in Turtle, Swan, gay sexuality has been a commonplace of Doty’s work. If poems in Bethlehem in Broad Daylight provided a glimpse of gay life in the early eighties, this volume looks at the aftermath of that period. The title tacitly recognizes that theme with its allusion to Cavafy, whom Doty describes in “Chanteuse” as a poet of “memory’s erotics”:

That was all it took

to console him, some token of Alexandria’s

anarchic life. How did it go on without him,

the city he’d transformed into feeling?

Although Doty’s style is far from Cavafy’s, he shares a desire to change the details of life into feeling, and memory is similarly erotic in pull.

Being gay is not the sole focus of the poems, but a sense of living in an age of dying pervades. In “Brilliance,” for example, a friend of the narrator is caring for “a man / who’s dying,” trying to help him remain engaged with a world he knows he will soon be leaving by getting a pet. After first rejecting the idea, the man agrees to goldfish, at which point the narrator segues into a story about “a Zen master who’d perfected / his detachment from things of the world” and

remembered, at the moment of dying,

a deer he used to feed in the park,

and wondered who might care for it,

and at that instant was reborn

in the stunned flesh of a fawn.

So, Maggie’s friend—

is he going out

into the last loved object

of his attention?

So, too, Doty’s poems, with all their concern with mortality, remain connected to “the whole scintillant world.” The primary problem with this volume is Doty’s apparent urge to perfect The Mark Doty Poem, which, as in the example above, braids together two distinct narrative strands to reach a lyrical synthesis. Satisfying as the results of this form may be, it threatens to become formulaic.

An intelligent and eloquent critic, Bruce Bawer demonstrates in some of his poems the leadenness that marks the less successful new formalists discussed by Alan Shapiro. Many poems in Coast to Coast, despite considerable heart, labor under excessive literary consciousness; “I’m feeling Dickinsonian tonight—” one otherwise fine lyric begins, and another, “This is a sight Wordsworth never knew.” As pervasive are stiffness within the line and unimaginative use of rhyme, as in the opening of “Bookshelves,” a sonnet:

On the industrial fringe of Park Slope

one hot summer morning, we carried the boards

that would be our bookshelves onto President Street,

and tied the long pieces, with a hundred feet

of rope, onto the roof of my old car.

Our new home in Manhattan seemed so far,

I feared the knots would unravel, the cords

snap in two, the wood break free of the rope.

The presentation of gay relationships, as casual as Doty’s, is Bawer’s greatest felicity. The shopworn conceit does not need this elaboration, metrical variations are similarly clumsy, and the rhyme words are all nouns, except for a fairly nominative adjective; varying parts of speech helps avoid the too predictable chime at the line end. As seems the ironic case with some other new formalists, Bawer is at his most engaging when he drops received form.

Jane Kenyon, in Constance, her fourth collection, demonstrates admirably what can be achieved in the mainstream poem. She abjures tricky enjambments that call too much attention to themselves and concentrates on condensing language into relatively quiet lines that go about their business. And the business of this book is, to a considerable extent, dealing with her life-long struggle with clinical depression. Set against the backdrop of childhood recollection and current life on a New England farm, the poems build sets of relationships between children and parents, spouses, friends, and humans and the natural world from the fewest possible details. “Wood Thrush,” the ninth section of “Having It Out with Melancholy,” moves easily between the internal and external, delineating a careful emotional sequence:

High on Nardil and June light

I wake at four,

waiting greedily for the first

note of the wood thrush. Easeful air

presses through the screen

with the wild, complex song

of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment.

What hurt me so terribly

all my life until this moment?

How I love the small, swiftly

beating heart of the bird

singing in the great maples;

its bright, unequivocal eye.

The tone is fairly restrained, despite the speaker’s exultation at discovering a “bird’s eye” perspective on her life. Also moving are “Chrysanthemums” and “Pharaoh,” both of which apparently grow out of surgery performed on her husband, Donald Hall. “Pharaoh,” especially, gains force from its indirect approach to the possibility of death, moving through the awkwardness of adjusting to post-surgical life (“Touch rankles, food / is not good”), to the closing image of the husband under a sheet as “a sarcophagus,” surrounded by “the things [he] might need in the next / life... comb and glasses, / water, a book and pen.”

In her fifth volume of poetry, The Vigil: A Poem in Four Voices, Margaret Gibson extends her lyric talent into a book-length poem set over the course of a single day and involving four women who span three generations of a family. The event that draws mother Lila, sisters Sarah and Jennie, and daughter Kate together in October 1986 is the firing of Sarah’s kiln, the overseeing of which is the title’s vigil. The firing of clay into harder forms provides a central metaphor for the firming of relationships over the course of the poem. All the principals, as well as the relations between them, have been fired by the dysfunction and alcoholic codependence surrounding the father; gathered together, they are quickly “pulled in, watchful,” as Sarah observes,

As if an exacting angel

turned us inward, away from

whatever might be

said or done in truth, or pretense,

to soften grief

or give joy.

The women take their turns, each of their forms designed to reflect character: Sarah and Lila have long, spindly verses; Jennie speaks in brief prose paragraphs; and Kate delivers her thoughts in long lines divided into one- or two-line units. Such devices are important, for distinguishing between voices through diction or syntax is not one of Gibson’s accomplishments, though members of a single family provide considerable challenge in that respect. Plot, also, is not a significant aspect; instead, Gibson teases us forward, revealing through lyric accumulation a shifting complex of believably intimate relationships.

The shifting relationships in Materialism, Jorie Graham’s fifth collection, are those more often treated in post-structuralist treatises than books of poems: between concept and object, signifier and signified, text and reader, and even energy and matter, the central relationship that drives this lyric meditation. In fact, several selections in the volume are “adapted” from prose works by authors as diverse as Plato, Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Audobon, Stanislavsky, Walter Benjamin, and Benjamin Whorf, concerning physics, mythology, linguistics, and natural history. Individual poem titles, including the repeated “Notes on the Reality of the Self,” “Subjectivity,” “Invention of the Other,” “The Visible World,” and “Existence and Presence,” point toward Graham’s concern with our role in a world of matter. In “Steering Wheel,” for instance, she anatomizes the process of backing a car out of a driveway, noting the complexity of observation and interaction usually taken for granted in routine tasks. Each poem acknowledges the difficulty of finding a text to represent the apprehension: “Oh but I haven’t gotten it right,” she interrupts “Steering Wheel,” then guiding the poem closer to the mark.

Real human exchanges are rare. The poems prefer the distance of memory or observation, as in one of the “Notes on the Reality of the Self,” in which the speaker watches a man in a bakeshop “who sits, hands folded eyes closed, / above the loaf still entire, and speaks inwardly / huge strange thoughts of thanks.” From such detailed observation of others, by implication, can the speaker come to know herself. More often, the speaker grapples with nature, either through a window or, in “The Visible World,” by sorting through by hand:

...If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I

break it apart without

crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled

airy loambits,

and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot

in...

Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back.

Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now

as on this patch

of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out

sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what

would it

take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will

insist on

making meaning.

Graham’s language is both precise and lyric (apart from unfortunate lapses into Deconstructionist jargon, such as “Erasure”), and her lines register subtlety of inflection. The close observation of both nature and action is occasionally thrilling, and her facility with poetic technique often enviable, but at times the book seems overweighted toward the intellect, pleasures of the eye and ear subordinate to the demand of calculated argument rather than the argument with ourselves from which, Yeats said, poetry is made.

Like Graham, Brenda Hillman employs an external system of thought to help structure the poems in Bright Existence; unlike Graham’s secular sources, however, Hillman grounds her work in gnostic lore, as she did in the companion volume, The Death Tractates (reviewed in CLC 76). Whereas that collection details Hillman’s response to the death of a close female mentor, these poems range over details of daily life for a newly divorced mother, including eating with her daughter in McDonald’s, attending therapy sessions, and collecting dry cleaning. Like those in Materialism, the poems emphasize a relation between self and the outer world, raising questions about the nature of reality, but they are based in a spiritual tradition that focuses questions inward, to the soul rather than the intellect, seeking to heal the fracture between the spiritual and the material. From the austerities of gnosticism, Hillman makes a poetry surprisingly open to joy, though joy—”Adult Joy,” as she titles one poem—is inextricable from sorrow: “The slender vessel used for weddings / was also used for funerals,” she begins, concluding that, when “[w]e grow up,” “Joy becomes the missing event, / what reaches us unknown / without wisdom.” Still, wisdom is what we seek.

In most religious disciplines, the everyday world is the realm of practice. So Hillman’s poems grow from mundane chores, from the sights, sounds, and textures of daily life as they reveal both cleft and possibility of healing. At their weakest, particularly in the fourth section, the techniques call too much attention to themselves—parenthetical asides that never close, commas repeated or dropped a line—as well as a kind of word salad reminiscent of some of Roethke’s work, with echoes of nursery rhymes and gibberish. The impulse here, however, is to capture the workings of a mind released to the depths of memory or darkness of solitude, occasioned, for instance, by the slight scraping of a branch against a night window which “made the sound / of missingness” (“Branch, Scraping”). In general, however, Hillman develops details across well-heard lines, as in the title poem:

In spring, the great pines waited a little faster.

Wildflowers turned

on their big circles, under the earth

and the orchid, which always came back

to the same slanty light

in the forest floor

pushed toward the edges of itself.

...

The oak moths,

holding pale tomorrows,

dropped on invisible threads before the flower,

the part that wasn’t ready

stayed inside a little longer

and the part that was ready to be something

came forth—

While neither as fully satisfying or consistently well crafted as Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris, Bright Existence similarly reaches toward the base of our lives. In Hillman’s poems, overbearing darkness, though returning each night, every morning grows lighter. Two strong collections in as many years mark Hillman as a promising poet.

The Year in Poetry 1992

2009-04-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

The process of reading most volumes of poetry published in the U.S. during an entire year provides a wider basis for drawing conclusions about “the state of American poetry” than most casual readers would willingly invite; the nineteen collections reviewed were selected from nearly 200 perused. Sadly, most books read over this year and last demonstrate minimal craft, both in terms of the poets’ abilities to use aural, rhythmic, metrical, or figurative elements and their broader skills at structuring poems to reflect a complex of emotional and intellectual responses to the world. To call most books published in any given year “mediocre” states a statistical commonplace; more troubling, the quality of work produced by widely published and honored poets ranks as slight when measured against a standard that includes the best of what has been written. The institutionalization of mediocrity, ratified by committees that dispense such annual laurels as the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, reflects not only a nationalized indifference to the state of poetry but a frightening level of ignorance concerning it.

Two collections of essays by accomplished poets speak to this situation. Given the much-publicized bickering between new formalists and dedicated “free verse” writers, we might not expect frequent agreement between Dana Gioia and Denise Levertov, yet their essays, which address a wide variety of problems involving contemporary poetry, occupy extensive common ground.

The centerpiece of Gioia’s selection is his hotly discussed 1991 essay which gives the volume its title, Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture. Additionally, “Notes on the New Formalism” and “The Poet in an Age of Prose” provide cogent insights into the state of the art; Gioia’s assessments in these essays are buttressed by the incisive analyses he displays in treatments of individual poets as diverse as Wallace Stevens, Weldon Kees, and Ted Kooser, among others. Gioia reads poems with both acuity and sensitivity; his ear rarely errs. While clearly partisan in the debate over the use of form, Gioia articulates convincing arguments for broadening our poetic base; in “The Dilemma of the Long Poem,” he speculates how an intelligent eighteenth-century reader might respond to our claims for the “scope and diversity” of contemporary American poetry:

His overall reaction, I suspect, would be a deep disappointment over the predictable sameness, the conspicuous lack of diversity in what he read. Where are the narrative poems, he would ask, the verse romances, ballads, hymns, verse dramas, didactic tracts, burlesques, satires, the songs actually meant to be sung...? The panoply of available genres would seem reduced to a few hardy perennials that poets worked over and over again with dreary regularity—the short lyric, the ode, the familiar verse epistle, perhaps the epigram, and one new-fangled form called the “sequence,” which often seemed to be either just a group of short lyrics stuck together or an ode in the process of falling apart.

The acerbic wit as well as the scathing judgement are typical. And while some might argue with individual points (no lesser a poet than Yeats often worked in the “sequence” to powerful effect), much of our strong reaction against Gioia’s scorn results, I suspect, from defensiveness and denial.

Denise Levertov’s New & Selected Essays gathers nine essays published in her two previous volumes of essays together with sixteen newer ones, grouping earlier with more recent essays in clusters concerning the work of William Carlos Williams, poetic technique, the place of the poet in the world, and her own spiritual growth as reflected in her work. Her essays on Williams’ work underscore the problems of intelligent poetry criticism in this country; she undertakes in “On Williams’ Triadic Line” to correct several generations of critics’ misreadings of Williams’ prosody. Her essays concerning technique also address the impoverished condition of poetic awareness and the need for greater clarity concerning such essential technical matters as the line. “Not only hapless adolescents,” she writes in “On the Function of the Line,” “but many gifted and justly esteemed poets writing in contemporary nonmetrical forms, have only the vaguest concept, and the most haphazard use, of the line.” Yet, she stresses, the line “is a tool, not a style.” Her essays are guided by a vision of “aesthetic ethics,” a pervasive sense that “artistic quality...[is] bound up with artistic integrity.” Shaped by this ideal, they provide a firm guide for our readings in contemporary poetry.

This year’s most significant publication is Hayden Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems. For too long Carruth suffered the lack of a consistent publisher; as a result, much of his best work has gone unnoticed or too little noticed. Notable in a volume as diverse as this are Carruth’s monologues and poems about characters delivered in lines that echo their speech; as the speaker in “John Dryden” notes, “have you noticed / I can’t talk about him without talking like him?” Like Frost, Carruth captures a sense of character and place while subtly presenting a complex set of meanings, discovering the kind of “natural symbol” ordinary people grapple with to understand their lives. One of the most powerful, “Marvin McCabe,” is a monologue by an inarticulate speaker whose friend “Hayden” acts as amanuensis for the poem. Marvin McCabe details his upbringing and the accident that left him incapacitated—able to think but not talk. The credible voice, by turns bitter and accepting, builds through tonal control to a powerful conclusion:

Sometimes I sit

here in this bay window and look out

at the field, the hills, the sky, and I see the boulders

laughing, holding their sides and laughing,

and the apple trees shaking and twisting with laughter,

the sky booming and roaring, the whole earth

heaving like a fat man’s belly, everything

laughing. It isn’t because we’re a joke, no,

it’s because we think we aren’t a joke—that’s

what the whole universe is laughing at. It makes

no difference if my thoughts are spoken or not,

or if I live or die—nothing will change.

How could it? This body is wrong, a misery,

a misrepresentation, but hell, would talking make

any difference? The reason nobody knows me

is because I don’t exist. And neither do you.

Other poems in this mode include “Johnny Spain’s White Heifer,” “Lady,” “Marshall Washer,” and “Regarding Chainsaws.”

Carruth’s lyrics display a range of diction and vocabulary which allows him to modulate easily from low to high style and to incorporate moments of humor in otherwise serious, even solemn poems without violating that tone. As in the following passage from “Once More,” his lyrics often derive from careful observation of the natural world, not merely to see things but to consider, as he writes in “The Ravine,” “relationships of things”:

Once more by the brook the alder leaves

turn mauve, bronze, violet, beautiful

after the green of crude summer; galled

stems, pithy, tangled, twist in the

flesh-colored vines of wild cyclamen.

Mist drifts below the mountaintop

in prismatic tatters....

Typically, Carruth presents his observations through details objective enough to allow us to “see” the situation yet in language that renders the emotional construct of the subject.

The later poems in the volume, following Carruth’s move to Syracuse, New York, in 1979, shift not only idiom and locale, as in Asphalt Georgics, a group of poems written in syllabic ballad stanzas employing frequently hyphenated enjambments, but open up very different poetic territory in the Whitmanesque-lined and loopingly discursive poems from Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands. The first of these laments the passing of the agrarian lifestyle that provided the basis for traditional georgics while celebrating the persistence of human life amid suburban sprawl that threatens that spirit. The strategies of apparent tangent and indirection Carruth uses to build these poems evolves into structures, in the second, which accumulate like jazz riffs and motifs: they seem to diverge wildly from the “point” of the poem only to swoop around at the end to enlarge the idea of point. Unfortunately, the newest poems are not consistent; both the selections from the late Sonnets and the section of new poems are less fully achieved.

Finally, a collected poems provides a perspective on a poet’s career. And this volume demonstrates what some readers have long known: Hayden Carruth possesses greater range of style, scope of subject, and diversity of formal skills than any other poet working in the United States today.

Gary Snyder’s No Nature is billed as New and Selected Poems, yet the generosity of selection suggests that the process was closer to that of a collected rather than a selected volume. Snyder’s greatest accomplishment is his ability to hew to a chosen subject matter and style yet discover means to broaden and enlarge the approach. His style—a combination of language, line, and informing attitude—has changed little from the poem gathered in Riprap to the newest poems in this collection. (One complaint about the volume’s apparatus: nowhere are initial publication dates of original books available; even the copyright page is of little use.) In fact, those first poems, including Snyder’s versions of the poems of Han Shan, are among the strongest in the collection. Here, the influence of Chinese poetry and Kenneth Rexroth make for concise, evocative descriptions of places and people, in which commentary is kept to a minimum. “Hay for the Horses,” one of the strongest, recounts a nameless worker’s trip “From far down San Joaquin / Through Mariposa, up the / Dangerous mountain roads” to deliver hay, ending, as he shares lunch with a narrator whose presence is restricted to distanced presentation, with these lines in the worker’s words:

“I’m sixty-eight,” he said,

“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.

I thought, that day I started,

I sure would hate to do this all my life.

And dammit, that’s just what

I’ve gone and done.”

This simplicity of presentation eludes Snyder through poems in the middle period, where the influence of Pound, with a layering of counter-cultural preachiness, becomes more dominant. The poems from his 1983 collection, Axe Handles, come closest to returning to this clarity of voice, particularly the title poem, which concerns Snyder’s realization, as he shows his son how to make a handle for a hatchet, that the wisdom of an Oriental master, “First learned from Ezra Pound”—”’In making the handle / Of an axe / By cutting wood with an axe / The model is indeed near at hand’“—applies precisely to the rearing of his own children. This volume contains enough of these gems to rank Snyder as an important journeyman in contemporary poetry.

While we expect a certain amount of weeding when a poet prepares a volume of collected poems (not the same as “complete,” which should include all work gathered in books as well, perhaps, as previously uncollected poems and even juvenilia), a selected poems should result from a very different process of inclusion. Last year in this space I complained about the lack of both apparatus and rigor in Robert Creeley’s Selected Poems; this year’s raft of selected poems prompts another cavil regarding such volumes. A selected poems should, first and foremost, be justified by a poet’s maturity (older than fifty) and stature; success over the long haul seems reasonable warrant. Beyond that, extreme rigor should be exercised: weed and prune, then go at it again, leaving the representative best, period. Galway Kinnell and Hayden Carruth have produced models of what a selected poems can be; theirs weigh in at 148 and 165 pages, respectively, and Carruth, in particular, is a prolific writer. Finally, because a selected volume garners the best, poets should resist the impulse to include new work side by side with old. The new work, however strong, has not survived the acid tests of time and critical evaluation; a selected volume, at its best, serves a specific function, and that does not include testing fresh work.

By these criteria, William Matthews’ Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991 ranks highest of the volumes surveyed, failing only the test of length. The selections from newer volumes are more generous than from his earliest, which is to be expected; poets should grow. The selection confirms that Matthews possesses greater wit and intelligence than most of his contemporaries in what David Dooley calls the “Interregnum generation.” This selection also suggests that Matthews’ strengths are rarely well served by the way he chooses to cast his poems. From his earliest collection, Ruining the New Road (1970), Matthews’ poems most often employ the accepted period style such as it evolved from spindly poems with an au courant politically tinged surrealism, through the prose poems and one-liners that mark his second collection, to the increasingly wider lines and stanzaic forms in his more recent volumes. The flat rhythms and throw-away enjambments that characterize academic poetry in the seventies and eighties are not the best vehicles for an epigrammatic and formal wit; sharp wit requires equally sharp articulation, the way Auden wrapped his wit in masterfully poised rhymes and meters.

Matthews’ early poems, when they free themselves of cute, neo-surrealist flourishes, seek to reveal the mystery contained in the mundane, a calling that attracted him to the work of Jean Follain, a selection of whose prose poems (translated with Mary Feeney) are included. Yet even his treatment of themes involving childhood, the pleasures of company, and pervasive loneliness, find fuller treatment in later volumes. Flood (1982) contains the moving lyric consideration of life among the divorced, “Good Company,” which begins:

At dinner we discuss marriage.

Three men, three women (one couple

among us), all six of us wary.

“I use it to frighten myself.”

Our true subject is loneliness.

We’ve been divorced 1.5 times

per heart. “The trick the last half

of our lives is to get our work done.”

The strongest work occurs in his most recent collection, Blues If You Want (1989), which shows Matthews testing the waters of metrical verse. Many poems use rhymes, not quite irregular enough to be accidental but not yet with applied consistency, and two extended monologues in the voice of jazz musicians approach blank verse. These poems, “Every Tub” and “Straight Life,” employ extended narration in a way new to his work. We might not completely believe that we’re hearing unedited commentary by black musicians, but Matthews gets the tone and details right, and we can believe that Matthews’ imagination has won over new territory.

Like Matthews, Stephen Berg has seemed a representative Interregnum voice, yet his New & Selected Poems shows off an under-appreciated talent. The selection from four previously published collections contains some poems cut from period cloth, but even his early work shows an affinity for a long line and a depth of emotional probing unusual in a generation of poets too often willing to settle for surface effects. Both “Sister Ann,” with its sprawling Whitmanesque lines, and “Desnos Reading the Palms of Men on Their Way to the Gas Chambers” exceed cataloguing to inhabit worlds of suffering. Several poems from his second collection, Grief (1975), confront the poet’s despair concerning not only his father’s suffering and death but his own inadequacy—or the language’s—to articulate his grief, as in the concluding lines of “What I Wanted to Say”:

The streetlamps glow with a sudden brightness,

you feel satisfied with the cracked chimneys,

the dull orange haze blowing across the stars,

you could sit endlessly on the steps, smoking,

doing nothing, and never speak again.

But this isn’t what I wanted to say.

The birds were calling me, I think. Or someone.

There were tears. I stumbled. My jaws ached.

I bent over my sleeping children to say goodbye

and each one turned to me and smiled. But this

came back—your dead face was a blank white

flower opening in me, which I couldn’t touch.

I stood somewhere, saying, “Nobody can say this.”

Notice how the end-stopped lines prevent the rhythm from building, keeping the pace steady, somber, accumulating its effect so that we pause, weighting even the final “this” of the only completely enjambed line in the passage.

The final third of this volume is a selection of newer poems, including a group of prose pieces from a work-in-progress, Shaving. Here, the newer work seems included after considerable weeding, and is justified if only because of the power of the final poem, “Homage to the Afterlife,” published as a limited edition. This extended poem, owing more to Ginsberg’s remaking of the Whitman line than to Whitman himself, gathers force through its anaphoric refrain, “Without me.” Individual “lines,” ranging from a few words to nearly two pages in length, drive us with their accumulation yet force us to read carefully because Berg utilizes asyntactic composition to represent the logic of associative thought, delving into anger and fear surrounding parental loss and rejection conflated with a first, defining sexual encounter. A brief passage cannot capture the poem’s force, but these lines give a taste:

Without me, the doctor answers my pleading question Why did she hate me so much with Because you exist

Without me, but that is not the story it’s beyond not in details memories feelings washed up into the present by the wounds struggles to understand survive walk talk eat work sleep and in between the story

Without me, wanting to understand wanting to get rid of who we are what’s happened to us and not act can’t have accept can’t accept

Details accrue slowly, through repetition; the poem attempts to unfold the ways in which we simultaneously seek to hide from and reveal the things that hurt and grace us most powerfully.

We might first ask why Tom Clark’s Sleepwalker’s Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1991 was necessary. Born in 1941, Clark has 48 published volumes listed at the beginning of this new collection, and the author’s note indicates that this is the fifth volume of his selected poems issued by Black Sparrow since 1978, the last most recent published in 1990. Granted that not all of the 48 books are volumes of poetry and even that being prolific is itself no single grounds for condemnation of quality, the question of need remains. Many of this book’s 212 pages are scarcely filled. One section of new poems, “Diary of a Desert War,” is comprised of often no more than one or two lines per page; one reads in its entirety, “Rode into brown hills—death in the air.” This 44-page section could easily have been printed in ten pages, with no loss either of poetic effect or design quality—and this, like all Black Sparrow books, is beautifully designed and produced. This kind of profligate wastefulness seems an apt metaphor for Clark’s talent; he has wit and intelligence but is too often satisfied with a brief, cute impression, the kind of tossed-off effort that characterizes so much Black Mountain derivative poetry. Better if inspiration were allowed time to deepen, the work granted more opportunity for revision. Overall, the older, selected work satisfies more, perhaps because time has done the difficult job of winnowing every poet should be expected to perform in assembling a book.

If at times we wish Julia Randall’s The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems, which gathers work from her six previous collections, were a bit shorter, it is not because line by line the poems lack craft, intelligence, erudition, and even humor; rather, while her craft has developed since her first volume was issued in 1952, style and subject from the earliest poems resemble those from the sampling of new work. Randall writes about nature and the place of humans in it, whether backyard gardens or woodland, but nature imbued with something beyond the purely natural or human, suggesting something of the divine. And Randall knows more about nature underfoot than most of us, as evidenced in these lines from “The Banana Tree at Carney”:

I asked the audience what they found obscure

about my work, and one said,

“Words like sycamore.”

I wouldn’t try paulownia on him

though they’re so common in the Shenandoah

I cropped some pods for Mother, coming home

one Christmas, thinking

how nice they’d look on the mantel, but as usual

with what an adult daughter brings,

my mother said, “What the hell are these things?”

Somewhat peculiar is her tendency to break regular meter and use, as above, occasional strict rhyme, a habit that spans her career. If the book occasionally drags, continued reading yields frequent pleasure.

Much less rewarding is Mary Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, winner of the 1992 National Book Award. Arranged in reverse chronology, this selection exemplifies critic Sven Birkerts’ complaint regarding this practice: “If...the poet has declined, then the arrangement scarcely serves his or her best interests—though, admittedly, when that’s the case any policy other than self-censorship is a bad one” (The Electric Life 197). The earliest poems in this over-long volume show a promising talent for detail and lines whose rhythms build at least minimal tension, as in this passage from “A Letter from Home”:

Here where my life seems hard and slow,

I read of glowing melons piled

Beside the door, and baskets filled

With fennel, rosemary, and dill,

While all she could not gather in

Or hide in leaves, grows black and falls.

The tendency for line breaks over-emphasized by syntactical units could, with work, be vitalized to allow more variation, and the ability to envision these particulars could be expanded to a net to gather in more of the world. Such, however, was not the path Oliver chose.

She has developed a characteristic line that is brief and even more determined by syntax, and her eye for detail, still focused on the natural world, too often imposes a false, sentimental tint on what she imagines. Like Roethke, whose view of natural minutiae involved exploration of the self, Oliver’s true subject in these poems is herself, but without Roethke’s deep psychological probing; she seems satisfied with seeing something just closely and accurately enough we will likely commend her on her sensitivity, however imprecise the image. Take, for example, these lines from “Lilies”: “I think I will always be lonely / in this world, where the cattle / graze like a black and white river...” I have watched many grazing herds of cattle, and their movement has never struck me as resembling the fluidity of water—nor does it after reading these lines. The opening stanza of this same poem (which one reviewer has singled out for praise), displays her too-typical slack lineation:

I have been thinking

about living

like the lilies

that blow in the fields.

The lines clunk predictably down at the end of the first convenient syntactical unit. This would make for dull prose, laden with prepositional phrases that bury the natural energy of the sentence. Pound demanded that poetry be at least as well written as prose; these days we need to add, “good prose.”

Honoring such tepid verse seems the more perverse considering the mastery displayed by at least three of the other four nominees: Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems, Gary Snyder’s No Nature, and Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (reviewed later), each of which takes nature as a primary subject and treats it with greater fidelity of observation, depth of feeling, and felicity of craft. Until whatever passes for a poetry establishment can recognize quality of thought, feeling, and craft as they work together to inform a body of work, American poetry will be marked by the preponderance of the trivial.

Finally, the publication of Muriel Rukeyser’s poems in Out of Silence: Selected Poems makes available work which was allowed to go out of print by her commercial publishers. Perhaps because so many of her contemporaries achieved such high levels of accomplishment and notoriety, Rukeyser’s work has suffered neglect. Her work does not display the consistent mastery or polish of Lowell or Roethke, nor does it usually display the near-histrionic idiosyncrasies of Berryman or the reserved craft of Bishop, but her range and attack equal and surpass, for instance, Stanley Kunitz and Jarrell. Her work, from its earliest, seeks to merge traditional prosody with lessons learned from Modernist masters like Williams. Her poems often seek to create a mythology of the self, drawing on classical gods and heroes as well as a sense of archetypal pattern. These lines open the third section of the title poem from Waterlily Fire (1962):

Many of us Each in his own life waiting

Waiting to move Beginning to move Walking

And early on the road of the hill of the world

Come to my landscapes emerging on the grass

The stages of the theatre of the journey

Other subjects lend themselves to her radical political sentiments, often at the expense of the work; we do not appreciate enough that poetry which allows its politics to slide into propaganda, however well-intentioned, is no more savory than work which allows emotion to blur into sentimentality. This tendency is exaggerated by the editorial decision to resurrect Rukeyser as a political poet and feminist, too often overlooking the more delicate lyrics. For all that, Rukeyser’s work deserves redeeming, and her editor Kate Daniels has done her justice.

Another notable restoration is Christopher MacGowan’s painstakingly edited and annotated edition of William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, apparently the final volume in New Directions’ re-edited issues of Williams’ complete works. By combing through every published edition and comparing them with galleys and typescripts, MacGowan has attempted to present Paterson in a version that best reflects Williams’ intentions. The typescript versions of the preliminary drafts of a sixth book demonstrate how laborious this task was; following his strokes, even Williams’ typing requires considerable interpretation. MacGowan sought not to correct every possible typographical or printing error; if an error seemed a “mistake” Williams deliberately made in composition, MacGowan chose to retain it. This volume gives us a clean, accurate version of an important poem; readers will be served by New Directions bringing out an affordable paperback edition quickly.

A book-length poem in the Williams-Pound mold, Peter Dale Scott’s Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse is the second volume of a projected trilogy. Like Paterson and The Cantos, it includes references to and quotations from a variety of sources: philosophical, religious, political, and poetic; unlike its precursors, it cites sources in the wide margins and appends a ten-page bibliography. Quotations from foreign languages are also marginally glossed. The quotations amplify and extend the personal references—the poem’s primary subject seems the development of personality refracted through memory—to demonstrate the kind of composite “the life of the mind” is. Another theme, underscored by the telescoping references, is the difficulty of embodying understanding in language; this passage occurs toward the end:

even the sutras say

Go beyond language Bodhidharma 44

and if the excitement of childhood

is now elusive

at least to put irony behind us

and so deeply inhabit

the night’s silences...

At times the lines lack fluidity, but the poem’s scope and intelligence propel us through the more prosaic patches.

In Iris, Mark Jarman undertakes a very different kind of book-length poem, both homage to Robinson Jeffers and exploration of how his tragic vision provides a centering focus for one woman. At the outset of the poem, the eponymous heroine, a native Kentuckian who dropped out of college after she became pregnant by a fellow student she met in the course which introduced her to Jeffers, returns home with her young daughter after leaving her abusive husband. Jarman presents the rural Southern milieu credibly and handles the ensuing violence (her brothers’ primary cash crop is marijuana, and they are murdered while Iris and her daughter are away from the house) with care, neither sparing detail nor wallowing in it. Following this, Iris, who has nourished a quiet passion for Jeffers since that college course—finding, if not comfort, a more expansive world view in his lines—takes her daughter and mother on a quest across the continent to Jeffers country, the rugged California coastline. The heart of this narrative is not a compelling sequence of events; after the early blood-bath, the violence is for the most part internal, deriving from frustrated passions and the apparently near-complete inability of these characters to find words to express their inner lives. Iris comes closest toward the end of the poem, in conversation with a hitchhiker. Speaking to the woman in the dark, she says,

“...You’d think with all the death in it, my life

Would be a tragedy. But I’ve kept my real life a secret—reading Jeffers

And trying to imagine him imagining someone like me....”

This ambitious undertaking suffers primarily from the constant comparison to Jeffers. Jarman’s long-lined poem deliberately recalls Jeffers, but the diction is less elevated, the rhythm more relaxed, the syntax less fevered. While this makes for easier reading than Jeffers, this diminution signals a similarly diminished vision, the breadth of perspective deriving from the reference to Jeffers rather than any intrinsic quality of the poem itself. As the passage above suggests, Iris’ life aspires to tragedy, the mainspring of the most powerful of Jeffers’ poems, but the best she seems capable of—perhaps the best most of us, people and poets alike, are capable of these days—is merely melodrama flavored by the hope of something higher.

Shorter and more lyrical in its approach, Brendan Galvin’s Saints in Their Ox-Hide Boat recounts the voyage of St. Brendan the Navigator, the sixth century Irish abbot, and his small crew of Brothers who, according to conjecture, make their way to North America well ahead of Columbus. St. Brendan’s voyage, a “blue martyrdom” to separate himself from worldly interruptions the better to contemplate God, was the source of considerable fancy; Galvin’s poem imagines St. Brendan narrating his account to a young monastic scribe, needing constantly to curb his embroidery:

Don’t mis-hear an old man and set it down

that we came across souls out there.

They were as surely seals as those

radiant blobs we sometimes plowed

our way through in the dark were jellyfish,

not souls. Seals, I said, not souls.

Galvin’s diction seeks a middle ground between contemporary usage and a style designed to suggest an older and decidedly Irish locution. This works well for him on the whole, allowing him latitude enough to pitch toward lyric highs while not preventing the necessary and deflating humor. The breadth and depth fall short of what Jarman aims for in Iris, but Galvin’s tauter line and greater compression of detail may sustain more consistently.

Brenda Hillman’s brief Death Tractates, her fourth collection, focuses on the poet’s process of grief following the loss of her closest female mentor. This sequence interrupted, a note informs us, the manuscript Hillman had been working on and finally took shape as a separate volume. Elegies are a staple of world poetry, often among the most profoundly moving poems in any language. Hillman, however, does not engage the elegiac convention directly; rather, her poems, rooted in gnostic lore, attempt to grapple transparently with the process of wrenching deep sorrow into language. The untitled central poem in the book begins:

—So the poem is the story of the writing of itself.

In the white tent of the psyche

or out there in the normal fog:

the mockingbird all spring:

she looked just like a note herself,

each bit of music slipping past her

till it stopped—

each time one note missing;

it wasn’t exactly failure on her part,

she just needed something to do tomorrow.

Same thing with the poem....

She concludes:

You had to be willing to let it through the sunshine

error of your life,

be willing not to finish it—

Many of the poems, like this one, open with a dash, and all end with one, underscoring the sense of the poems forcing themselves onto paper and the idea of the inherent incompleteness of the attempt.

Most of the poems manage a comfortable juxtaposition of commonplace imagery—supermarkets, backyard birds, libraries—with more abstract meditations on the various possibilities of the afterlife, for Hillman never doubts that the soul continues. The style, too, is an odd mix of standard syntax and punctuation that occasionally breaks down, perhaps under the pressure of expression, into less conventional forms. The voice of the poems is unabashedly personal, leaving little doubt that this is no contrived persona grappling with theoretical poetic problems. When she writes in “Split Tractate” that, even in her sorrow, she held onto “the problem / with pronouns,” we see this in the shift from “I” to a “you” that is clearly the object of self-address rather than the easy avoidance of self-reference popular among too many poets. While these devices seem occasionally labored (particularly the use, almost always following an enjambment, of “What” as a catch-all term for the unknown), the poems accumulate with surprising force.

If Brenda Hillman’s poems are characterized by restraint, Tess Gallagher’s poems surrounding the death of her husband, the fiction writer Raymond Carver, gathered in Moon Crossing Bridge, her sixth collection, seem too often lush, orchestral arrangements heavy on the strings. The volume opens promisingly with “Yes,” a poem similar in its austerity to the work of Linda Gregg:

Now we are like that flat cone of sand

in the garden of the Silver Pavilion in Kyoto

designed to appear only in moonlight.

Do you want me to mourn?

Do you want me to wear black?

Or like moonlight on whitest sand

to use your dark, to gleam, to shimmer?

I gleam. I mourn.

The ending is not pushed; the emotions build through restraint to the final twist: however much the darkness of death may permit love to gleam, that light cannot be a shimmer. Unfortunately, the remainder of the book does not live up to this promise. While moments in the book achieve beautiful insights into the process of mourning—like the speaker in “Paradise” rubbing oil into the feet of her deceased lover “because it is hard to imagine at first / that the dead don’t enjoy those same things they did / when alive”—too often the poems descend into what seems self-congratulation; this poem continues, “And even if it happened only as a last thing, it / was the right last thing.” Hillman never presumes to judge her mourning so consistently favorably. At almost twice the length of Hillman’s volume, Moon Crossing Bridge might have served subject and reader better had greater rigor been exercised in selection.

The themes of death and grieving recur in The Father, Sharon Olds’ fourth collection. These poems examine the processes explicitly, clinically, seemingly motivated by the conviction, apparent in her earlier books, that truth is best approximated through sparing none of the sordid or embarrassing details. Many such details are keenly observed and register the intended emotional color. When details are recycled from poem to poem, however, vivid supporting notes become washed and finally pallid when they recur as central images. The poems also display a good ear for an effective line, but they accumulate predictably; her formal sense entertains little variety. Most distractingly, perhaps, Olds’ use of metaphor deteriorates with alarming frequency, as when she writes of her father after learning that his death is imminent in “Wonder”:

When he sickened, he began to turn to us,

when he sank down, he shined. I lowered my

mouth to the glistening tureen of his face

and he tilted himself toward me, a dazzling

meteor dropping down into the crib...

The rapid telescoping of time, from the speaker in the present bending to kiss the father to the flash memory of him bending toward her in her crib, is nicely accomplished; but the shift in metaphor from “tureen” to “meteor” is so mixed that it startles us out of the poem to wonder how something this dreadful ever made it through the final cut. This lack of editorial rigor appears as well in her inability, as in Gallagher’s volume, to prune the weaker poems, to conserve images from poem to poem rather than squandering the effect.

Whereas The Father renders a world-view both personal and secular in common speech, A Gilded Lapse of Time, Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s third collection, presents a vision steeped in history, pervaded by religious intricacy, and decorated with elevated diction and syntax. The volume consists of three long poems, concerned with the web of relations among history, God, love, poetry, creation, and death, explored through the occasion of a visit to Dante’s tomb; artistic renderings of scenes from the Passion; and a meditation on the life and death of Osip Mandelstam. Schnackenberg’s vision rarely descends to the simply personal, though the first poem seems to derive from a feeling of loss of love and the attempt to regain it. Imagining Dante wandering the Wood of the Suicides in the fourteenth section, she writes:

And as for me, once I had seen that seeping

At the root of that outcry, I kept to myself,

Afraid that if I spoke, my tongue would

Touch those mutilated words, I was afraid

That if I spoke, I would taste blood....

Through her exchange with Dante, the speaker seems to hope to regain a sense of how poetry, informed by love, translates the world; she concludes this section noting that what she would say regarding these suicides she “heard / when [she] thought poetry was love, and [she] had / Sickened of poetry.”

While not metered or rhymed with any regularity, Schnackenberg’s lines are highly wrought; the syntax is long and elaborate, though accumulation rather than subordination characterizes the build. The language itself is dense, consciously poetic and highly referential; few readers, however erudite, will make sense of these poems without frequent recourse to the appended notes. The driving motive of the poems, in fact, seems more the desire to create beautiful artifacts of language than to penetrate to the depths of any truth; she has far too much fun exploring the gilded nooks and crannies of speech and line to derail the process into a more incisive approach. She herself seems to write in that perfect time she imagines for Mandelstam,

when poetry will be filled

With a peripheral fleet of swans

Glimpsed in the heavy, carved mirrors

That bring the willow park

With its long, statue-ringed, green ponds

Through the windowpane

Into the drawing room...

(“A Monument in Utopia,” 1)

Given such richly accomplished splendor and seriousness of purpose, we might easily lose ourselves enough not to notice—or particularly care—that the beautiful means often seem an end in themselves.

Less intoxicated by her own verbal facility, Louise Glück explores the complex relationship between God, humans, and the natural world with startling emotional depth in The Wild Iris, her sixth collection. Far from the strained and occasionally awkward lines and language of her previous books, these poems strive for and usually master an elegant lyricism in the imagined voices of wildflowers; of God manifest in wind, light, and changing seasons; and of a woman who struggles to find evidence of God while laboring in a garden in a cold climate. In poems most often titled “Matins” and “Vespers,” the human voice expresses fear, frustration, and love, while “checking / each clump for the symbolic / leaf” in the garden and entertaining the apprehension that God, the addressed “you” of these poems, “exist[s] / exclusively in warmer climates....” Plants, most often wildflowers, counter these prayers, presenting a view more eternal for the accelerated brevity of their lives. Here is “Scilla” in its entirety:

Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we—waves

of sky blue like

a critique of heaven: why

do you treasure your voice

when to be one thing

is to be next to nothing?

Why do you look up? To hear

an echo like the voice

of god? You are all the same to us,

solitary, standing above us, planning

your silly lives: you go

where you are sent, like all things,

where the wind plants you,

one or another of you forever

looking down and seeing some image

of water, and hearing what? Waves,

and over waves, birds singing.

Glück’s gift in these poems is a capacity for lyric eruption coupled with emotional restraint. The voices are passionate but never hysterical; plants and God chide humans, as in the poem above, for their apparently willful ignorance, but the criticism never reads as self-pity.

Perhaps most audaciously, Glück undertakes to render divine speech, the language of the “unreachable father.” She succeeds by imagining the voice of God not anthropomorphically (beyond the personification implicit in imposing specifically human language on flora and the divine alike) but as natural phenomena, a pantheistic sense of divine manifestation. The poems work their magic in part by never making explicit the convention of the book; as we read, we come to understand what these different voices represent. The occasional confusions serve Glück’s purpose; we come to see how our own sense of ourselves gets imposed, repeatedly and unconsciously, on things sacred and mundane—how those very categories reflect our peculiarly human view. The centerpiece of the volume, appropriately titled “Midsummer,” begins by seeming to speak for the gardener:

How can I help you when you all want

different things—sunlight and shadow,

moist darkness, dry heat—

Listen to yourselves, vying with one another—

And you wonder

why I despair of you,

you think something could fuse you into a whole—

As the poem builds, we correct our reading and understand that God regards us with the same frustrations with which we regard tomatoes that fail to blossom as we had hoped. We were not, this divine voice informs us, “intended / to be unique”:

You were

my embodiment, all diversity

not what you think you see

searching the bright sky over the field,

your incidental souls

fixed like telescopes on some

enlargement of yourselves—

Why would I make you if I meant

to limit myself

to the ascendant sign,

the star, the fire, the fury?

These poems grapple honestly and successfully with questions of ultimate reality, not sheering away from critical self-assessment nor veering into a merely postured piety. They sing and praise and renew with successive readings.

The Year in Poetry 1991

2009-04-27T08:12:00.000-07:00

The conflict between the new formalist/new narrative poets and staunch advocates of free verse (what one critic has called, respectively, “newfors” and “freepos”) reflected the larger political world in its de-escalation of hostilities, not in this case, however, due to the complete destabilization of either camp. Evidence from books perused suggests that most poets still write in free verse, although a generous number of “formalist” books were also issued this year. Many predominantly free-verse volumes demonstrate increased attention to the trappings of form, such as regular stanzas and lines that assimilate to a normative meter.

In part, the terms of the conflict may have been changed. In an article published in the May issue of the Atlantic, “Can Poetry Matter?,” Dana Gioia, prominent polemicist for the new formalists, examines the problem in current poetry as a matter of poetry insiders and outsiders. This seems a relabelling of existing camps—with newfors generally equated with outsiders and freepos insiders—yet Gioia does identify a problem: poetry has too much insulated or isolated itself from the “average reader.” One disturbing result is that most volumes examined for this review seemed not only cut from the same cloth but tailored in the same shops from a scant selection of patterns, books by freepos and newfors alike. Too many volumes consist of poems competently crafted but lacking depth, lacking what Donald Hall in “Poetry and Ambition” called higher ambition—the drive not to publish in the right magazines but to write great poems.

This situation affects poetry publication as well. Increasingly, although major commercial houses do maintain a carefully chosen list of poets to show that they remain culturally active, the burden of keeping new poetry in print has fallen to university and independent (small) presses. Ideally, interested and involved individuals would be responsible for publishing poetry; the risk, however, is that editors will be poets trained at the same workshops as those they publish, promoting and perpetuating a narrow sensibility. The truth lies somewhere in the middle ground. Granted, most of what was published by any press reflected competent mediocrity, yet independent presses issued two thirds of the volumes selected for review. They include established publishers like New Directions as well as newer but vital presses like Story Line, and poets range from leading lights like Czeslaw Milosz to first-book authors.

Linda Gregg’s third collection, The Sacraments of Desire, represents the best of what independent presses have issued. Although the work continues to reflect Gregg’s tutelage with Jack Gilbert, few of these poems seem as derivative as those in her first collection, Too Bright To See. These poems, like Gilbert’s, are spare, almost sparse, focusing on what Gilbert calls “real nouns,” names of particular things. The influences are the Greek Anthology and Chinese and Japanese poetry, with their ability to use the most simple things to explore psychological, emotional, and spiritual depths by selecting the fewest necessary details and presenting them in words that, by their very simplicity, resonate with greater significance.

Most of the poems in this volume are short, running a page or less. “Kept Burning and Distant” represents the thrust of her work:

You return when you feel like it,

like rain. And like rain you are tender,

with the rain’s inept tenderness.

A passion so general I could be anywhere.

You carry me out into the wet air.

You lay me down on the leaves

and the strong thing is not the sex

but waking up alone under the trees after.

No adverbs and only two adjectives, and the first of these surprises with its sudden shifting of what may have seemed a fairly conventional metaphor—lover as rain. Yet modifying “tenderness” with “inept” pulls the conceit out of the conventional and also displays a level of distance on the part of the speaker that prepares for the movement of the final line. The twined themes of lust and loneliness run through the book.

The two best poems here are both longer. “My Father and God” is a moving elegy, largely spent describing her father’s extended travels into the desert to watch it blossom after rain. In presenting her father’s view, Gregg defines her own esthetic; she imagines her father,

[lying] on his stomach at sunrise on sand

and stone surrounded by rock and sand. To know distance

and know the close-up. Because he believed it was near

to God. The place nobody wanted. The parts of the world

left alone. The flatness where things are broken down

to the clearest form.

The fragmented lines and sentences characterize her form, a paratactic device conveying the accumulation of details as separate, never fully integrated until they are gathered into the whole the poem makes. This fragmentation both slows the poem by forcing full stops at each period and rushes us through because the fragments are all connected. Rather less fragmentary in style, “Driving to Houston” presents a speaker driving through the American heartland, reflecting on the failures of love in terms of the details of landscape.

Very different is Czeslaw Milosz’s Provinces: Poems 1987-1991 (translated by the poet and Robert Hass), which consists of his typically longer and longer-lined poems and sequences on frankly philosophic themes. Time—”that is, a division into was and will be” (“Creating the World”) and its processes, most particularly aging, shape the book’s principal concerns. The title, in fact, seems to refer, among other things, to human aging, as explored in “A New Province,” where the speaker explores old age, “that country” about which little is known “Till we land there ourselves.” This poem, and many others, wonder what survives the inevitable losses of life; “Poetry will remain after you,” he reminds himself, striving to derive some consolation, “A few verses, durable.” In “At Yale,” a sequence focused largely on painting as a representative art form, he notes of an anonymous painter whose “workshop / Together with all he had painted, burned down,” that “his paintings remain. On the other side of the fire.”

These poems constitute an effort to recover the past through the operation of controlled memory. Milosz writes of a “chronicler” who “tries to describe the earth as he remembers it / I.e., to describe on that earth his first love…” (“Far Away”). In “Return,” the chronicler has become a first-person narrator who in old age “decided to visit places where I wandered long ago in my early youth.” The remembered past, however, is effaced of many details, leaving the speaker “incomprehensibly the same, incomprehensibly different,” asking, “How can it be, such an order of the world—unless it was created by a cruel demiurge?” Yet we saw these same Gnostic creators in the wryly humorous “Creating the World,” where they appeared as “Celestials at the Board of Projects.” This unresolved tension between the comic and tragic provides much of the book’s satisfaction as Milosz attempts to fulfill the calling he defines in the wonderful opening poem, “Blacksmith Shop”: “To glorify things just because they are.”

Whereas Milosz writes from the perspective of old age, Thomas McGrath’s posthumous Death Songs presents the author’s final poems, many written with the knowledge of his impending death. The work here is lyrical, many poems ranging from only two or three to nine or ten lines, displaying an intense connection to the natural world and its spiritual mysteries, as well as the interaction of humans with it. The best of these short poems resemble haiku in their compression of statement and sentiment:

Memory

The wild cries

Fall through the autumn moonlight...

But the geese

Have already gone.

Unfortunately, the book seems to have gathered McGrath’s last work with too little attention to quality; mixed with the stronger lyrics are pieces that seem slight, occasional, or excessively repetitive.

The longer poems, mostly located in the first and third of four sections, reflect McGrath’s radical political leanings. The vision, however, as in the best of his work, is a personalized and humanized politics. For McGrath, as he writes of Ruben Dario, “the soil... / Entered him: from below: and was never wholly lost” (“A Visit to the House of the Poet”). His political commitment grows from his firm sense of the interrelationship of the parts of the planet: nature, agriculture, and human, both private and public. This last idea he explores in “There Is Also a Fourth Body,” the “body” of the outer political world that impinges constantly on the “solidarity” of the third, the private “body” made of a man and woman together.

The fourth section pushes to the foreground poems of departure, a poetic legacy, including poems to the poet’s family, reflections on the state of the world, and a poem to his son, bearing the title “Last Will and Testament,” that demonstrates in its regret that once in his life McGrath took an honest job to save money for his son’s future how he remained the consummate outsider until the end. McGrath’s ability to remain humble in his political convictions and to personalize the universal and universalize the personal mark his strengths. More rigorous editing could have given us this force undiluted.

The private for Mark Doty, an openly gay poet, is also political, though few poems take a directly political approach. In Bethlehem in Broad Daylight, his second collection, desire—even at its most carnal—is the way we struggle toward “the body’s paradise,” an approach to divinity. Doty’s subjects include a sixteen-year-old runaway living in a residential hotel in New York City, the clientele and performers at a seedy gay nightclub, the world revealed through books and artifacts, and, in the poem from which the title comes, an exhibition of patchwork quilts. His dominant theme seems to be the longing to grow beyond our solitude and the many forms that longing takes.

Even poems firmly rooted in autobiography flower outward from that center, including narratives that move away from childhood losses and learning to speak a language of emotional need to the ways we seek shape and significance in sexual exchanges. Yet Doty neither distances himself from his subjects nor, though some poems veer closely, degenerates into apologetics. In “Paradise,” the narrator checks his reminiscence of bathhouse-variety promiscuity to note:

I don’t want to glorify this; the truth is

I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,

though it is a blessing,

when all your life you’ve been told

you’re no one, and you find a way

to be what you have been told,

and it’s all right.

Doty’s poems have a sure narrative quality, braiding detail and situation in language and lines supple yet firm. His forms are loose, poems usually organized into stanzas of fixed length, with considerable enjambment of both line and stanza. At times the poems become a bit prolix, but he manages to balance between the openness of narrative and the stricture of lyric as well as he handles the balance between the personal and the social, the private and the public, desire and divinity.

Despite its title, Richard Jones’ second collection, At Last We Enter Paradise, demonstrates greater interest in the fallen world than lost Eden. The best poems focus on characters and situations apart from the poet or at best tangential to him, particularly the several poems concerning his drowned nephew. In these poems Jones displays a capacity to enter the lives of others and imagine their suffering. The more closely Jones treats his own life, however, the more the clarity of focus blurs, and the poems incline toward self-pity and self-indulgence.

The best of the personal pieces avoid these traps by engaging a more self-deprecatory stance. One of the most successful, “Letter of Recommendation from My Father to My Future Wife,” provides a humorous double portrait. Other nicely handled poems also explore the relationship between father and son, most notably “Back Then,” about work, and “My Father’s Buddha,” which involves a statue the father “stole / during the war from a village / in Burma” and gives to the son:

Now the Buddha sits on my desk,

compassionless, half-smiling,

mindful as I devote myself

to the task within the gift,

to do as my father taught me:

save one thing

and offer it to the morning sun

which sees all things

for what they are.

In this poem and others Jones captures the complexity of human relationship in carefully selected detail. The lines and language, however, too often go slack where greater tension and precision would render experience more sharply.

The private mystery of Sherwood Anderson’s stories colors the poems in Debra Allbery’s first collection, Walking Distance, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. That Allbery was raised in Enterprise, Ohio, Anderson’s hometown, accounts only superficially for the echoes of sensibility; concerns with the landscape and the humans who attempt to find their place in it go deeper than that. The best of Allbery’s poems are extended narratives, though their sequence is never plodding or predictable. She makes poems of recollections often cast in blank verse deftly enough that they call no attention to their craft. Consider the opening stanza of “Produce”:

No mountains or ocean, but we had orchards

in northwestern Ohio, roadside stands

telling what time of summer: strawberries,

corn, apples—and festivals to parade

the crops, a Cherry Queen, a Sauerkraut Dance.

Somebody would block off a street in town,

put up beer tents and a tilt-a-whirl.

The focus on detail to present a picture both visual and social or emotional characterizes her best poems.

Allbery pitches her poems predominantly in the middle range but slides when appropriate into a heightened style or, as in a monologue sequence in the voice of mass-murderer Charles Starkweather, a credibly lower one. This poem, which draws on Starkweather’s letters for details and some recast passages, is particularly notable for its largely successful effort to present Starkweather without either sentimentalizing him (her fellow Ohioan James Wright’s failing) or condescending to him. She manages this same balance in poems that draw more on personal experience, moving from the mundane to the mysterious through sharply drawn details and occasionally startling but apt metaphors.

Philip Levine’s twelfth collection of poems, What Work Is, also deals with the lives of people in the industrial Midwest, lives shaped by the need to work, driven by varieties of poverty. The style is characteristically flattened; lines often follow predictable syntactic breaks, allowing energy to drain from the possible tension between sentence shape and line. For all of that, the best of these poems show a genuine depth of human concern. The title poem, for instance, begins with the speaker standing “in the rain in a long line / waiting....For work,” and seems to take a tack that may be somewhat hostile or condescending to the “educated” reader:

You know what work is—if you’re

old enough to read this you know what

work is, although you may not do it.

From this description of waiting in line, Levine moves to consider the love for a brother “home trying to / sleep off a miserable night shift / at Cadillac so he can get up / before noon to study his German,” which he needs “so he can sing / Wagner, the opera you hate most....” The poem concludes with a surprising shift back to recognize self-failing:

How long has it been since you told him

you loved him, held his wide shoulders,

opened your eyes wide and said those words,

and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never

done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you’re too young or too dumb,

not because you’re jealous or even mean

or incapable of crying in

the presence of another man, no,

just because you don’t know what work is.

The weaker poems demonstrate the same metrical and musical flatness and lack this poetically and humanly elevating discovery and exposition of self, degener-ating at times into the kind of posturing and self-importance this poem avoids.

Like Levine, Lucille Clifton writes poems of personalized politics, focused on the lives of common people. Unlike Levine, however, she avoids the stance of condescending self-importance. At times the poems become a bit too shrill or polemical, but the best poems reflect the quality of common life and art fitted for use suggested by the collection’s title, Quilting: Poems 1987-1990. Clifton employs a minimal style, eschewing upper-case letters and punctuating sparely, yet her control of line and syntax are sharp enough that her sense remains clear; also, she commands more than a single stylistic range, incorporating from the low, middle, and high styles through the volume. We hear street voices, older voices, and the voice of an educated poet, modulated carefully from poem to poem. While weaker poems fall into an easy rhetoric of declaration rather than presentation (“nothing so certain as justice. / nothing so certain as time.”—”february 11, 1990”), the best poems find their way through a delicate music and wry humor. Typical is the third and final section of “from the wisdom of sister brown,” “on the difference between eddie murphy and richard pryor”:

eddie, he a young blood

he see somethin funny

in everythin ol rich

been around a long time

he know aint nothin

really funny

The lines and language capture the values of spoken wisdom.

Stylistically, Brenda Marie Osbey’s third book, the narrative Desperate Circumstance, Dangerous Woman, resembles Lucille Clifton’s poems. She, too, casts her poetry in lower-case letters and with minimal punctuation across lines that derive from the rhythms of black speech, in this instance, Creole dialects from the Treme district of New Orleans. Beyond those essentially superficial resemblances, however, her work avoids the directly political or didactic to stitch a patchwork of voices into an oblique narrative of romantic intrigue obscured by Hoodoo ritual and practice. This results in a dense, richly textured poetry that surrenders sense only through patient reading. Speakers shift from section to section with no introduction or transition, leaving us to piece the whole together as we go, forcing us to reassess and shift perspective constantly. Yet the rewards are worth the struggle, or perhaps the struggle itself becomes part of the reward; we make sense of this world and these relationships through the same processes of accumulation and sorting we use in “real life.”

Osbey’s dense style creates a world both mysterious and realistic. The poem uses the speech of the time and the place; she appends a glossary of ethnic terms and place names, which allows her to set tone and mood without compromising vocabulary and still gives the reader a fair chance, albeit with a little work, to follow. No single passage can present the fullness of her accomplishment, the music of repetition and shifting voices, but this passage from the “Prophecy” section gives some sense of the texture:

it comes to this then:

sacrament

ritual

the casting of nets on muddied waters

the long walk back

bended knees

the taking and giving of blessings.

i was a young woman

and now i am old.

i see the things the young cannot see.

i turn my eyes in on my heart.

don’t let me put my hands to dirt, i pray

don’t let me put my hands to dirt

No less complex is the narrative structure of Stitching Porcelain: After Matteo Ricci in Sixteenth Century China, Deborah Larsen’s book-length sequence based on the life of a Jesuit priest who smuggled himself into China. Larsen draws on various historical accounts and Ricci’s own writings for material but fully translates all that she borrows into a sequence propelled by lyric intensity rather than narrative accumulation. Individual poems refer to events and situations the poet explains in marginal glosses, and endnotes provide further information and references. Such appendices offer an imperfect solution to the problems of the historical or culturally foreign sequence, but they allow poets like Larsen and Osbey to explore their material without compromising the texture of the poem itself or diluting its force with explanation.

Larsen employs a variety of forms in individual pieces, drawn from sources as different as Chinese poetry and the Catholic litany, which reflects the cultural melding of the circumstance. The highpoint of the sequence is the climactic “Blue Lights,” Ricci’s deathbed meditation, borrowing elements of form from another Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Wreck of the Deutschland”:

Our heart-valves

sough, hesitate, and seal, becoming

instruments of narrow music.

I grow thin on this canal, a form

undone by feldspar, air, and star.

Cast me as an antique server: I’d play to backs

to wake a blank Wanli, the eunuchs,

mandarins; and Her whom, not possessing, my heart loves.

Larsen demonstrates a fine ear for this difficult music, as well as the more subtle music of lyrics modelled on the Chinese. This sequence demonstrates considerable craft and ambition for a first book.

Since the publication of Daily Horoscope, his first collection, Dana Gioia has become the most visible advocate of the new formalism, a stature which has increased pressure for a new collection. Unfortunately, the poems in The Gods of Winter show no development of depth—particularly emotional depth—and display a pervasive slackening of craft. Throughout, most tellingly and damningly in the two long poems that occupy a separate section each, the meter plods, disappointing after the varied caesurae, delicate enjambment, and flexible deployment of stress that characterize the best of his first volume. Here are the opening tercets of “Counting the Children,” the first long narrative:

“This must have been her bedroom, Mr. Choi.

It’s hard to tell. The only other time

I came back here was when I found her body.”

Neither of us belonged there. She lived next door.

I was the accountant sent out by the State

To take an inventory of the house.

When someone wealthy dies without a will,

The court sends me to audit the estate.

They know that strangers trust a man who listens.

The frequent end-stopped lines further hamper fluidity, forcing us to hear the march of every regular line.

If loss of metrical flair were compensated by a gain in depth, the lack would perhaps not be so noticeable. But the poems, particularly the two extended narratives, lack drive and compression. The accountant speaker of the above-mentioned poem demonstrates no particular motivation for his concern with the room full of dolls that operates as central metaphor. The second of the longer efforts, “The Homecoming,” concerns a sociopathic fosterchild who escapes from prison and returns to murder the woman who raised him. The poem is certainly timely; we read daily of the casual atrocities committed against children such as this. But, despite Gioia’s attempt to justify this speaker’s self-insight and formal articulation, the poem fails to convey the full terror of the situation. Interestingly, the most fully realized and emotionally satisfying poem in the book, “Planting a Sequoia,” an elegy for a son who diedsoon after birth, is composed in supple but controlled free verse.

Ironically, for all their polemics, the new formalist/new narrative poets suffer from many of the problems they attribute to free verse poets; the craft, while minimally competent, too often involves predictable rhyme and marching meter, and their work demonstrates, despite rhetorical claims that focus on a more objective narrative structure somehow counters the self-absorption rampant in the personal lyric, little gain in substance and depth.

Perhaps even more than Gioia’s new collection, Frederick Feirstein’s City Life, his fifth collection, exemplifies the discrepancy between polemic and practice. More than half of the volume is devoted to a dramatic poem titled “The Psychiatrist at the Cocktail Party.” Plodding meter and rhyme do nothing to salvage a narrative that fails to elevate the subject matter beyond the level of television melodrama. The sequence unfolds over the course of a New York City cocktail party peopled with all the predictable types: crass businessman, charismatic Central American rebel leader, emotionally hungry and flirtatious women—characters far too stock, even granting satirical intent. The psychiatrist displays little capacity for objective observation, miring himself in several superficially handled intrigues. Feirstein attempts to delineate character by using various stanzaic forms for separate characters, but he lacks stylistic control to differentiate the voices clearly through syntax and vocabulary.

Much more successful in its use of formal elements, David Mason’s first book, The Buried Houses, employs form to present poems that probe emotional life with genuine insight and feeling, rather than for the sake of the verse itself. Elegies, especially for his brother, meditations, poems on historical and mythological themes, and dramatic monologues in deftly modulated voices provide a collection of poems consistent in their accomplishment but diverse in their range.

Mason displays a firm sense of tone and diction, using words with care and never seeming to choose them with an eye toward filling a metrical slot. This results in metered verse that flows with the colloquial elegance of Frost. The poems in imagined voices are as natural and unobtrusive as the lyrics in his “own.” One of the most moving of the poems is the extended narrative monologue “Blackened Peaches,” from which this passage comes:

The black leaves was death, though. I knew for sure

they would take someone. That year Mama died.

That year, while the trees was still all blighted,

Doctor Hale was killed. His horse took a fright

out on Mountainview Road, pulled his buggy

off a bridge, and threw him into the river.

There’s foxes on the road; people suppose

it was the foxes give that horse such a scare.

Without violating speech patterns of the character, Mason creates a rich verbal music and casts it across varied but firmly anchored pentameter lines. Mason’s book, co-winner of the Nicholas Roerich Prize, furthers that award’s reputation for publishing strong first collections.

Michael McFee’s third volume, Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board, also consists of poems written in unobstrusive form. Like Mason, he uses form to provide an armature for poems that might slide into slackness from the burden of colloquial speech and private recollection. The poems accumulate as a kind of sequence memorializing the poet’s mother through a process of sorting through old photographs after her death and reimagining her life in its complexity, both before the poet’s birth and through his childhood. Too often poems based on photographs become workshop set-pieces, never getting beyond the glossy surface; McFee uses the device, however, to animate the characters and color their world—not the rosy tints of refinished portraits but the chromatic register of the real world, complete with shadings of grief and happiness.

The culmination of McFee’s collection is “Grace,” a long narrative cast in Spencerian stanzas. Set during the end of World War II, it imagines the lives of the mother and her younger sister, including the failure of a marriage, the difficulties of the world, and the complication of the sister’s budding romance with an intellectually inspiring (to her) but married conscientious objector serving nearby. This stanza appears in the final section:

She thinks about the War, a feature movie

shot far from this peaceful border. No one

seems to suffer here, really, not even

those who lose boys. Did it matter who won

such a war? Walt had asked. “We can’t just run

from it,” Lois said, “and nothing can keep

war out of our hearts.” The same dog-day sun

ripens crops and rots corpses, shines on sheep

and bombs. Molly thinks of Walt, gone. She falls asleep.

The weaker poems here tend to be those more centered on the poet than on the remembered and recreated mother, but even they are handled with careful craft.

The Cardinal Heart, R. T. Smith’s fifth full-length collection, gathers newer poems with a selection of poems drawn from earlier chapbooks and limited editions to present the full range of his work. His poems are generally rooted in the South, its landscape and sensibility; the best are not confined by that but spread themselves to concerns as diverse as Native American ritual and history, the life of Emily Dickinson, and a lyric meditation on The Book of Kells. When Smith strays too far from his grounding, the poems—like “Self as Trout” and “Fence”—can seem overly self-conscious and lose his distinct voice. His strengths come from his good ear for the music of the language—a virtue connected with a love of words apart from their value as “Signifiers,” as he notes in the poem of that title—and good eye for revealing detail. Here is the opening of that poem:

Perverse, I contemplate the weather of words.

Anyone else can tell you they matter

not because of pattern

or deep music

or their notorious pasts,

but because they name something, cast a small spell

on things that exist outside us,

or within, as when we say “cold,”

not for the sake of knowing water,

but because we touched it and the temperature transferred.

Other poems grow from observations of the natural world and remembrances of the poet’s grandmothers—but not the trite and sentimental poems that too often grow from these subjects.

Andrew Hudgins departs from markedly Southern subjects in his third book, The Never-Ending, though otherwise the poems return to the manner of his first collection—lyrics inclined toward narrative, cast for the most part in unobtrusively metered lines. As the title suggests, this book takes, as did his first, frankly religious topics as recurrent themes. Gone, however, are the carefully handled and humorous monologues of that first collection; while many of the poems bear his characteristic—and occasionally tonally inappropriate—humor they seem propelled by a more personal impetus.

Interspersed through poems of personal narrative and recollection are poems that take as their subject paintings on the life of Christ. This seems structurally questionable; scattered throughout the collection, they lose energy they might gain from being assembled together. Among the most successful of these, “The Cestello Annunciation” focuses its religious consideration around compositional problems inherent in the painting: how we “frame” questions about spiritual matters metaphorically related to how a painter “frames” a scene.

The most moving poems involve a narrator we’re not discouraged from associating with the poet and his relationships with friends, lovers, and God. “Green Inside the Door” recalls the early days of a marriage, when the couple lived in a basement apartment overrun with mildew, forcing them to remove their possessions out into the yard:

We left wet shattered things

out drying in the sun, returned

to almost barren rooms that reeked of bleach

and slept still holding hands, raw burning hands

that we would not let go. Some books, some chairs,

some knickknacks all survived,

and so did we, my love, but separately.

While also notable, “Praying Drunk” includes, in an otherwise thoughtful poem about the ways the self approaches God, elements of scatological humor that distract from rather than enhance momentum. The final “Psalm Against Psalms” effectively pulls the book’s thematic threads together.

All of the volumes so far reviewed fit comfortably in the “mainstream” of contemporary American poetry: poems of meditation, autobiography, occasion, and unambiguous (if occasionally obscure) narrative sequence. They do not, at least explicitly, raise questions of epistemology or signification, yet these projects have occupied some territory in the poetic landscape since Williams and Stein. Imagism and Objectivism shaped the endeavors of the Black Mountain poets, while Stein and the more extreme aspects of Stevens suggested directions for members of the New York School and, recently, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. The final three volumes under consideration, operating at the margins of the mainstream, specifically address issues of language and consciousness, often exploring those problems for elements of style as well as subject.

Robert Creeley’s Selected Poems gathers, the dust jacket informs us, “200 poems from over four decades”; unfortunately, that brief note constitutes the entirety of the volume’s apparatus. The table of contents does not provide information on dates of original publication. While readers can cross-reference with his early volumes, the Collected Poems, or the acknowledgements to determine that this selection gathers work from volumes published between 1962 and 1989, the task should not be so difficult. Nor does the volume indicate, apart from the table of contents, where poems from one collection give way to those from another. A selected poems serves a distinct critical function: to allow readers to assess the poet’s career; we expect adequate apparatus to aid that endeavor. Likewise, the selection should be rigorous, excluding all but poems that best represent the range and development of the opus. Such is not the case here. The volume sprawls to a hefty, and unjustified, 353 pages of poetry. Much could have been cut. If Thomas Hardy’s poems can be represented in 130 pages, who among contemporary poets rates two to three times the space? Perhaps the practice of allowing poets to assemble their own selected poems needs serious re-examination.

The volume does represent the whole of Creeley’s career, including all the poems we expect to find. The bad news is that both his poetic project and gifts are revealed as exceedingly narrow. Following Williams, he employs line breaks to call attention to the ways language builds, shaping intellection through syntax. His best poems discover a peculiar music, syncopated and often atonal, in their brief lines, contorted syntax, and radical enjambments, tools he employs to explore the process of moving from perception to conception:

Position is where you

put it, where it is,

did you, for example, that

large tank there, silvered,

with the white church along-

side, lift

all that, to what

purpose? How

heavy the slow

world is with

everything put

in place....

(“The Window”)

A poem like this forces us to read slowly—or perhaps reread often, since the enjambment accelerates us through the lines, concentrating on the task of making sense from sentences. Unfortunately, the book reveals that Creeley has not grown from this strong beginning; even the early poems are repetitious, and poems from midway through to the end become increasingly lax and unfocused.

John Ashbery continues to challenge conventions of signification in Flow Chart, his thirteenth book of poems. A single extended poem, like The Prelude and Four Quartets it explores the development of consciousness. That said, however, expect neither the sequential clarity of the former nor the sustained philosophical and lyrical progression of the latter; this book is as frustratingly unyielding and seemingly obscurantic as anything Ashbery has recently published. His chosen task seems to involve the systematic probing and undermining of our accepted notions of how syntax and semantics wed to make easy sense. So, too, this book provides maddening occasions of pronouns that lack apparent referents, words gathered into sentences that parse grammatically but finally refuse to concede logical sense, all composed in lines of musical elegance, even—or especially—when they loosen to seeming slackness.

But this is not to condemn the book; in fact, Ashbery’s “meaning” comes clearer when we realize that, like The Waste Land, the poem is not related from a single point of view or even a progression of clearly delineated speakers. Instead, voices overlap, blend, and mingle to present the cacophony of a mind at work—voices from the media, echoes from literature, the overheard babble of conversation, all weave through to become part of the speech of consciousness. Throughout, Ashbery provides “clues” to his method; this passage occurs early in the poem:

Words, however, are not the culprit. They are at worst a placebo,

leading nowhere (though nowhere, it must be added, can sometimes be a cozy

place, preferable in many cases to somewhere), to banal if agreeable note-spinning.

Covering reams of foolscap with them won’t guarantee success,

yet neither will it automatically induce ruination; wheel on the guillotine;

leave, in the middle distance, something like an endless morgue, a lake of regret.

It is better though to listen to the strange chirps of the furniture.

A single reading will yield passages both perplexing and provocative; ferreting sense requires genuine commitment.

Like Ashbery, Jorie Graham presses the limits of syntax and sense, though her poems avoid the surrealistic humor of Ashbery’s long poem and, despite the length of some of the poems, are more accessible if only because they are lyrics, even if skewed to the verge of obscurity. Region of Unlikeness, her fourth collection, continues her evolution away from the mainstream. Poems begin in personal experience but quickly shift to considerations of how we know what we know and how we find the ways to say it. At their weakest, this can seem almost programmatic; at their best, these poems demonstrate brilliant ease and fluidity, capturing the rhythm of the mind at work, cross-cutting between modes of subjectivity.

The opening poem establishes her method; “Fission” blends recollections of watching a movie, including ways that our perception of cinematic reality keys our own sensory responses and memories, with the announcement by an audience member that JFK has been shot. The propulsive length of her sentences makes excerpting almost meaningless, but notice, apart from the content, how these lines imitate the headlong rush of overtaxed consciousness:

...undressing something there where my

body is

though not my body—

where they play on the field of my willingness,

where they kiss and brood, filtering each other to no avail,

all over my solo

appearance,

bits smoldering under the shadows I make—

and aimlessly—what we call free—there

the immobilism sets in,

the being-in-place more alive than the being....

“Immobilism” is an important concept for Graham—almost a method; her poems grow from moments when the psyche works so furiously that it draws all energy and renders us, like Wordsworthian “spots of time,” out of normal chronological flow.

The best of these poems engage us in the process of thinking; yet at times we can wonder whether the method exceeds what can be expected of even highly erudite readers. Endnotes inform us that many of the poems include deliberate misquotations of authors as diverse as Emily Dickinson and Nietszche, all unmarked in the text. Here a little compromise might be in order; even Eliot provided extensive notes to indicate where and how he alluded or altered. Pushed to this limit, few readers will be able—or even willing to try—to make sense of Graham’s efforts, and sense does seem part of her intent. Among the best offerings are “Manifest Destiny,” “The Phase after History,” “Who Watches from the Dark Porch,” “Spring,” and “The Region of Unlikeness,” which opens by evoking the confusion of an adolescent girl waking in a strange room beside unidentified breathing; it continues:

Don’t wake up. Keep this in black and white. It’s

Rome. The man’s name...? The speaker

thirteen. Walls bare. Light like a dirty towel.

It’s Claudio. He will overdose before the age of

thirty someone told me time

ago....

Fragmentary where the earlier passage sprawled, these lines display Graham’s ability to adjust syntax and diction to mimic the particular psychological flow. Note, too, how she registers the seamless shift in intellection between memory and commentary, image and analysis. This collection marks a significant talent defining its place.

25 Random Things About Me

2009-01-25T13:41:00.000-08:00

1. My father's first name was Allen, but I was given a different middle name so that I wouldn't be a junior. Until I went to kindergarten, everyone called me Stephen. Even after that, family friends and relatives continued to call me Stephen.

2. When I installed a woodstove in the first house I owned, back in the 1970s, I cut sheet asbestos for insulation with a power saw and didn't wear a mask.

3. The first two books of poetry I bought, at age 15, were The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound and Rimbaud's A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat, both published by New Directions.

4. I have been married four times.

5. I once dated Muriel Rukeyser's second cousin, who is also the daughter of Bill Rukeyser (Money Magazine) and niece of Louis.

6. I was born during a blizzard in October.

7. I prefer to drink English-style beers.

8. I have never lived anywhere except in New York State and Pennsylvania.

9. I have visited 35 states.

10. I had four stents placed in three arteries after my heart attack in 2003.

11. I own all four Die Hard movies on DVD.

12. I never finished Middlemarch. I thought it was one of the most boring books I ever read and can't understand why it's supposed to be a masterpiece.

13. When I first read Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, I didn't recognize the word "pubic" and thought it was "public" and couldn't understand why genital hair was called public hair since it was private. Although I also didn't understand about irony, I think that's what I thought it was.

14. I really enjoy both reading and writing in polysyndeton.

15. I got drunk in Florence in 1987. (That's in, not with.)

16. I developed a life-long problem with insomnia when I was eight years old and scared myself by trying think about infinity before going to sleep.

17. I am a compulsive maker of lists, but this exercise is very difficult.

18. I had my left earlobe pierced in 1977.

19. I like the smell of skunk because it makes me think spring is coming.

20. In 1980 I realized that I had a drinking problem and went clean and sober for seven years.

21. I hate--I mean, really hate--baseball.

22. I once almost ran into Telly Savalas when he came out of a revolving door in New York City. I don't think he even noticed.

23. I have never had sex in a taxicab.

24. I have never understood why anyone would want to warch Barbra Streisand in a movie. Or even listen to her sing. Or want to read gossip about her. Or, god help me, marry her.

25. I have large burn scars around my left and right ankles, and if you're really nice I'll tell you the story.

No-bama (5)

2008-05-01T12:11:00.000-07:00

I know they say that you shouldn't kick a man when he's down, but I've been kicking this guy since he was up, so it seems only fair. This guy is melting fast. The sad thing is that all his wounds are self-inflicted--which is what people really mean by "seasoned"; a more experienced politician running at this level would know better. The glad thing is that this is happening now; my biggest fear was that he'd coast through, get the nomination, and be seriously fucked in the fall campaign.

Let's start with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I mean--really? For a guy who knew he wanted to be president from about his second month in the womb, why didn't he run--fast, with his family in tow--the minute he had the slightest inkling of what his "spiritual advisor" thought? First sign of a rant--out the door. His polite distancing really wasn't enough. He said a couple of words then presto-chango shifted the focus to a discussion of race in America. Yeah, we probably need that conversation, but not in the middle of a presidential nomination campaign, not a bunch of bland platitudes, and not when the real subject is the hate-mongering sermons of your pastor.

Next, let's talk about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. I mean--really? The gets a taste of national coverage, and anybody thinks he's just going to go away? He's here--and he'll be back even if Obama manages to shift the focus away from him for a few minutes. This is news. Holier-than-thou Barack with a seriously deranged "spiritual advisor." Even Britney and Lindsay take a second seat to this.

Ok, then there's the "cling to guns," etc. remarks. We can skim over the insult to middle Americans; that's been covered enough. When I first heard this, I thought, "This man went to Harvard. Don't they teach history there?" Two of the cornerstones of this country--before there was such a thing as the United States--were guns and god. Why would he think any of this has changed? Founding principles stick with us, and there's a damn good reason why the first and second amendments to the Constitution cover god and guns. I don't think this was a mistake; Obama was surrounded by his true constituency, and he spoke from the heart. I think about the South Park episode where Kyle's father gets a hybrid and immediately becomes so overcome with his own self-righteous that he moves the family to--you guessed it--San Francisco. I love the city, but it does have that liberal elitist reputation.

Finally, let's face it, the man looks tired. At one of campaign stops a man commented on how run-down he looked, and Obama replied that he'd been campaigning for president for 15 months. I mean--what the fuck?!? So has Hillary, and she doesn't does look like she's ready to drop in her tracks. If this is how this bozo stands up during a nominating campaign, it doesn't bode well for a full-blown contest with an organization that proved many times over that it hasn't met a single jot of sleaze it won't manipulate in order to win an election.

Hopefully voter in the few remaining primaries will vote sensibly and the super delegates will at long last do the right thing for the party--and the future of the country.

Reading poems

2008-03-29T12:14:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure how this got started, but I notice that a lot of poets when they read deliver their lines with an upward lift at the end of the line.

deliver their LINES
with an upward LIFT
at the END
of the LINE.

It's a fairly unnatural method of reading or speaking and can often distract from the substance of a very good poem. I remember attending poetry readings when I was an undergrad, and no one ever read that way. It seems to have arisen with the ascent of the workshop culture wherein most of the students (now the instructors) are mostly familiar with the works of their contemporaries or the contemporaries of their teachers. I'm not saying I want to hear someone declaiming like Wallace Stevens or chanting like Pound or Yeats, but a good delivery that doesn't lose the prose sense of what's being said would be nice.

No-bama (4)

2008-03-19T08:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, he gives another one of his "inspiring" speeches, this time on racial issues. To which I say, finally. Why didn't he give this speech as soon race became an issue? Say, during the South Carolina primary. Begin to deal with it when it first appears. That way it doesn't give off the stink of a political cover-up. During the speech he dismissed the idea that he chose this time to give the speech because of the problems with Rev. Wright. Sorry, guy--that's a no-sell. It would've just faded into the woodwork, he said. Nope. Wrong again. This one's got legs. He had to have known what this guy was saying from the pulpit. He married Obama and Michelle; he christened his children. "How could I have know?" doesn't cut it. This was a classic cya speech, cut and dried.

The real question is why this man, who has had political goals almost from the moment he dropped out of the womb, was stupid enough to stay in this particular church. Did he think no one would ever bother checking up? That he's still in the race is testament to how easily the press covers this guy. Imagine if it turned out that John McCain's pastor delivered Aryan Nation rant as part and parcel of his sermons. McCain could write-off the nomination no matter how many delegates he's banked.

Politics. That's the bottom line. This guy is looking to maintain his political positioning. Hope? At this point I think we all need to hope that there isn't another one this bad waiting in the wings.

Sing

2008-03-03T10:31:00.000-08:00

Minister. O Lord, open thou our lips.
Answer. And our mouth shall show forth thy praise.
—The Book of Common Prayer

Sing, sings the titmouse.
Sing, sings the bullfrog.
Sing, sings the cricket.
Sing, sings the robin, its twilight note
piercing the air, the heart, moving
me to open my lips, not to the Lord above
but to the fallen shards of heaven
sprung to life, giving voice through all these
pied and dappled creatures for joy and praise
that life flows, that the trees flower, that all
life blossoms and burgeons, that we rise
each morning to watch the sun’s aureole
brighten the tips of the farthest trees, or rain
drip from the eaves, snow drop in its delicate,
intricate glory. Light, dark—the interplay
life’s Gloria that we, by speaking, by
singing, bring to our own, wholly undivided note.

Hand

2008-02-23T13:07:00.000-08:00

O gracious Father, who openest thine
hand and fillest all things living with
plenteousness…
—The Book of Common Prayer

Extend your hand beyond the door, beyond
the warmth of furnace and glow of fireplace, out
where the night winds chap the flesh and make
cold spread your body’s length. Extend your hand
and let the snowflakes settle in the dark, in the slight
breeze that spirals the flakes in the shards of moonlight
flickering between clouds that gather and scatter,
gather again. Extend your hand and let the darkness
rest in your palm, the plentitude, let the slight
spray of starlight exaggerate the hills and furrows
lining your hand, the world in miniature, hills that
rise beyond the pond invisible in the night, beyond
those hills the river, then the hills beyond that, the trees
and all the fruit waiting in their limbs to urge
outward, to press themselves furiously into light.

Snow

2008-02-22T13:02:00.000-08:00

It's about damn time. Five days ago the temperate was 60, maybe a couple of degrees warmer. Now snow. When I woke this morning, it was still untouched--the expanse of white blanketing the field behind the house down to the pond.

Of course, by the afternoon it had turned to rain, which turned the snow to slush pretty quickly, and they're predicting that, as the temperature drops later this afternoon, it will turn to sleet.

Still, for that brief time...

No-bama (3)

2008-02-16T14:46:00.001-08:00

I suppose what amazes me most is the momentum that such a mediocre public figure has established. I watched all of the "victory" speeches following Super Tuesday, and I've got to say that, of the five candidates, Obama seemed the least animated, the least connected with his audience, the most vague. Obama made Romney seem a paragon of audience engagement. Most of the time Obama spoke in vague oratical terms with not terribly inspiring oratory while he assumed GQ poses and spoke over the heads of his supporters, as though addressing the great visionary vistas. Too bad he doesn't have a vision. (Note to Barack: "Change" is not a vision; it's what of us do with our clothes.)

Obama's running the greatest con job since W's first run at the presidency. His policy proposals are vague compared with Hillary's (and Edwards' makes them look like kindergarten efforts), and he makes little indication either of how he'll enact them or how he'll pay for them. He has very little traction in Congress, mostly because he's served less than two years in the Senate and has done little of any note. Perhaps his most notable act was failing to show up for the vote on the Iran resolution for which he criticizes Hillary's vote. Puh-lease.

More than a third of his votes in the Illinois Senate were "present." Gee. That's what many of my students can claim while I'm desperately trying to get them to participate in the most elementary fashion in my English composition classes. Present. That's just what we need for a president. On the other hand, I guess that puts him a half step ahead of the current occupant of the Oval Office.

I think we should aim a little higher.

The stuff left out

2008-01-28T11:41:00.000-08:00

Whenever you compile a list of "top tens" (December 29, 2007), you realize that you left some very important things out. Sometimes the things you left out are so clearly important it's like being hit in the face with the flat side of a shovel.

I don't know what I'd leave off the lists I already posted, but James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss is certainly one of my favorite books--way up there. It's the best mystery I think anybody's ever written. If anyone's the true heir of Raymond Chandler, it's Crumley.

In terms of poetry, David Lee is one of the contemporary gems. Since I've limited myself to individual collections, I guess I'd have to list The Porcine Legacy, the first of his "pig" books, but Driving and Drinking is a close second. Driving and Drinking is a kind of rural take on Dante's Commedia, except it's also funny as hell. But The Porcine Legacy contains two absolute jewels, "Racehogs" and "For Jan, with Love."

Old poems

2008-01-17T10:43:00.000-08:00

At a certain point in one’s life, one begins casting backward, like a fly fisherman casts a fly downstream. I guess at 55 I’ve about reached that point. Being a poet means, in one way or another, one’s always looking back. That’s where the tradition is, and the tradition—whether Western or, in my case, Chinese and Japanese, as well—provides answers to questions that I might waste a lot of time trying to figure out myself; the tradition prevents us from having constantly to reinvent the wheel. We also, periodically, look back at ourselves, measuring the distance we’ve come, noting changes we’d make in older poems if we had it do all over again. Of course, we do have it to do all over again, and that’s the reason I've gone and looked at poems from many to several years ago. The poems cover about twenty years, from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, and represent early poems and poems that somehow never made it in collections.

This last may require a small explanation. For me, the process of taking poems I’ve written and turning them into a book involves looking as much for the unifying themes as judging which poems display the better craft and artistry. This means that perfectly good poems never find a home, except occasionally in journals, and lay about until I forget about them. Some of these poems never found their way into my first collection, A Fire in the Cold House of Being, and others were composed in the years following that publication. In the almost twenty years that passed between that book and my fourth collection, The Precincts of Paradise, during which time I published one rather thin collection of poems that worked around a very particular set of themes and a volume that gathered together three longer sequences of poems, I assembled many manuscripts, studied them, tossed some poems out and shuffled others in, the whole time looking for that unifying thread. Of course, some of those poems fell out of sight—might as well have been off the planet. Since I’d written most on a computer, as software has changed, copies of the poems have become irretrievable, unless I chose to root through my file cabinets and find those old manuscripts to see what they held. Finally, something nudged me to do just that, and I found a few pleasant surprises.

The course of a career is matter of evolution, whether slow or accelerated, and I’ve usually shown a considerable change of style between collections. Looking back at these poems, I’ve found flaws—wordiness, awkward use of line, clunky rhythm—which begged for revision. In revising, it’s hard not to apply the lessons learned in the interim, so many of these poems take dramatically different form than they did originally, which means, I suppose, that even as I’ve cast back I’ve kept my footing steady on the river bottom. At least I hope so.

No-bama (2)

2008-01-14T11:47:00.000-08:00

I still can't figure out what this guy is all about--either in terms of substance or voter appeal. As Bill Clinton said, he's a fairy. He spouts buckets of airy rhetoric with little real meat between the oratory. Edwards drives the bus, even though he's ranked third. I hope to hell, regardless of primaries, that he stays in because he keeps the others on track, particularly Hillary.

Now that everybody (except most of the Republican candidates) recognizes that our economy's in a melt-down and that something constructive has to be done, first Edwards and then Hillary stepped forward with genuine proposals for how to provide stimulus and, more importantly, aid during this time. As is often the case, even though Hillary takes longer to get her proposal out, she usually comes up with a more progressive policy than Edwards. (Maybe those votes to whom Edwards appeals but who actually vote for Hillary are onto something.) Typically, also, Obama waits till the eleventh hour and produces...a dud. As Paul Krugman noted in today's New York Times, "on Sunday Mr. Obama came out with a real stimulus plan. As was the case with his health care plan, which fell short of universal coverage, his stimulus proposal is similar to those of the other Democratic candidates, but tilted to the right."

This has been the case with every policy proposal he's put forward. His proposals are, from a genuinely progressive perspective, again in Krugman's word, "disreputable."

If you can't manage to hop on the Hillary bus, stick with Edwards to allow him the chance to keep prodding the others in something resembling the right direction, but avoid Obama. If this is progressive, then what's Huckabee or McCain?

Influence

2008-01-10T08:56:00.000-08:00

According to the OED, it derives from a term that means "to flow in," most literally as water but also as in the action of the stars--an astrological sense. So, when we speak of influences," we're talking about things that have flowed into us. Anyone who's ever seen where streams or rivers come together knows how difficult it can be to trace the workings of the separate currents as they become confused--brought together. Influence can be confusing. Chemists could move downstream from where the waters mingled and analyze particulates from one tributary as opposed to another, but such analysis is difficult in terms of human life, whether we're speaking artistically or personally.

Setting aside the stars as nothing but magical thinking, influence involves something acting on us, whether physically or emotionally or psychologically. How to trace it?

When I was fourteen or fifteen, for reasons I can't remember I became interested in poetry. I bought one of the usual paperback anthologies of modern American poetry and read through, probably not understanding a lot of what I read. The first volumes of poetry by individual authors that I bought were Ezra Pound's Selected Poems and Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat and a Season in Hell. (Both were New Directions books for whatever that's worth.) I'm not sure what I made of the Rimbaud, or even most of the Pound, but a couple of the poems by Pound really struck me. Content? Verbal music? I'll probably never know. But these poems do stand at the doorway of my love for poetry.

Thinking about Pound, I remembered seeing his grave when I visited Venice and wrote this:

At the Grave of Ezra Pound

It’s nothing special. A granite marker
set in the manicured grass, a few
flowers. The waterbus was crowded—
tourists, mostly, though few spoke
English. February wind blew
the chilly spume like spikes, a chill
that lasted under lowering skies
like the dark swirls in the glass
blown on Murano. I’d like to say
that thoughts of the great Modernist
revolution pummeled across my mind.
I’d like to say that the complex
torment of politics and art replayed
itself while I knelt to contemplate
the weathered letters, “EZRA POVND,”
but how long can you look at a chunk
of stone embedded in the earth?

For what it's worth, I started trying to read Ulysses before I began to read Hemingway and was hot for Hemingway before I started reading the Beats--in high school. Were these all influences? They certainly caught me in their currents at a fairly early age.

What's In the News

2008-01-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

Jack brought the paper into the bar, maybe
the morning edition he hadn’t had the chance
to read since breakfast was earlier than the paperboy
slapped the rolled-up thing against the storm door
Jack had finally changed a week before when
the thermometer finally began to read somewhere
south of forty, and he was usually two blocks away
heading toward work when he caught sight of the kid
dawdling up the sidewalk, lugging the sack, looking
himself like a sad-sack—I mean, didn’t he own a bike?
what kind of paperboy doesn’t ride a bike? if he rode
a bike maybe Jack could read the damned depressing
stuff that passed for news while he sopped up the egg
yolk with his whole wheat toast—and still at least
twenty minutes from Jack’s door. So, after dinner, he
comes into the bar, orders a draft and rattles the paper
so everyone in the place can hear him do it, and
everyone in the place glances at him, shakes his head,
and goes back to staring at the bubbles rising in his beer,
and Jack reads something, and, “For fuck’s sake,” he says,
“if that don’t beat all,” he says, and Kevin, sitting two
stools down can’t help but rise to the bait, and says, “What’s
that?” You never say “what’s that” to nobody sitting in
a bar unless you want to open some can of worms you
might not be able, not for another hour or two, be able
to shut, but there it was, sitting right there on the bar
solid as their two mugs and Kevin’s empty shot glass.
“Immigration,” Jack says, “all this holy horseshit they
all have to say about immigration.” “Who’s that,” Kevin
asks, already thinking he’s in deeper than he wanted,
and didn’t he know better than to start talking to some
guy reading a paper? Sometimes you just get what you
deserve. “All these,” and Jack makes a face like he’s eaten
a wad of snot, “politicians.” “Politicians,” Kevin says,
looking for a way to slam the lid down tight, “what the hell
do you want, politicians.” Not a question—a question
opens the door to an answer, and an answer’s the last
thing Kevin wants. He shrugs his shoulders and turns
back away from the slight turn he’d made toward Jack
and goes back to watching the bubbles rising in his beer.
Jack’s so busy being angry with the paper, he doesn’t
notice that Kevin’s tried to shut him out, and he says,
“Yeah, but they keep yappity-yapping on about this shit—
immigration. For Chrissake. Ain’t none of them Red
Indians, all their families come here from someplace else,
just like mine and, from the look of you, yours. Most of
them, probably can’t even count all the places their families
come from on both hands. Immigrants. Taking all
our jobs? Build a goddamn fence?” Jack takes a sip of beer—
more like a slurp—and shakes his head, looks up from
the paper and glances toward Kevin, his eyes a little slit,
and he asks, “How hard d’you work to get your job?”
“What,” Kevin says. “I say, what d’you do for a living?”
“Work at the paper mill,” Kevin says. “Hard work,”
Jack asks. “Hard enough,” Kevin says, not certain where
this is heading but not liking it one bit. “I mean,” Jack says,
“you need to know a lot to do your job?” “The fuck you
asking,” Kevin says, swiveling his stool back around
toward Jack. Jack raises his hands. “Just asking,” he says,
“don’t mean no offense.” “Well,” Kevin says, not sure
why he’s still talking when what he wants to do is loose
a few of this guy’s teeth, “it’s mostly computerized now,
got to make sure everything’s working on the level.” “So,
yeah,” Jack says, “you need to know a lot to do your job.”
“Yeah,” Kevin says, “you put it that way.” “Then why,”
Jack says, “would you be afraid some immigrant’s gonna
take your job away?” “I never said I was afraid of that,” Kevin
says. “But you are, aren’t you?” “I don’t think they got no
business coming over here, taking jobs away from Americans,
even if it ain’t my job they’re after.” Jack nods and takes
another pull off his beer. “How hard you work to get
to your job,” he asks, “you answer some add in a newspaper,
go down to the plant and sit through your interview, drive
there, drive home, got your heater running, maybe it’s
summer, got the air cranking it out?” “Yeah,” Kevin
says, “that’s about how it started, then I, you know,
worked my way up.” “But to start,” Jack insists, “you
drove over, did a sit-down interview, drove home, waited
for the phone to ring.” “Yeah,” Kevin says, “ain’t that
the way most people get their jobs?” “These immigrants,”
Jack says, “they wander in the desert for days, maybe
a week, got sandals on their feet made from worn-out
tires, don’t got nothing to drink, somebody catches them,
takes them back where they came from, they do it all
over again.” Jack drains the glass and taps it on the bar
for another. “So,” Kevin says, “what’s your point?”
“Somebody,” Jack says, sipping the foam off the fresh
mug, “goes to that fucking much trouble to get a job—
week in the sun, tires on their feet—don’t you think that
beats all hell out of how hard most of us worked to get
our goddamn jobs? And they get here, what, they
make wages most of us wouldn’t even spit on, even if
we weren’t within a hundred miles of getting a job.”
Kevin sees that Jack has that kind of look on his
face while he takes another pull on the beer and snaps
the paper for emphasis, and then he sets the mug
back on the bar and says, “Immigrants. Immigrants.
More Americans had that kind of gumption, the whole
damn country wouldn’t be circling the damn toilet.”

No-bama

2008-01-04T10:50:00.000-08:00

A friend of a friend writes that she'd vote for a goat in the next presidential election, as long as it bleated Democratic. Yeah, I'll go with the goat--though I'd prefer it if its name wasn't Obama. Man, that guy is scary. He runs on the slogan of "change," he's part of the system he hypocritcally condemns.

He says he won't take money from lobbyists; no, but he'll take money from lobbyists' wives, and he'll take full advantage of lobbyists' expertise and networks. "Change" is just another word for a scam, to wildly paraphrase Kris Kristofferson. The guy's as plugged into K Street as anybody on Capitol Hill, with the disadvantage of lacking any meaningful experience. Haven't Americans had enough of inexperienced presidents? With his lack of experience, who do they think he's going to sign-on as his advisors, cabinet secretaries, vice-president? Sheesh.

So, yeah, I'll go with the goat.

Government sludge

2008-01-02T12:14:00.000-08:00

For a period of time, between when her divorce was finalized and her ex-husband no longer provided insurance for her and when we were married and my insurance would, my wife needed Medicare. She's disabled, and there was no question that she qualified for various assistance programs, including Medicare, but, once we were married, my insurance covered her for an extra deduction from my salary. Hey, I'm lucky to have health care benefits as part of my employment package, so I figure that I should take full advantage. It's a good enough program, and certainly meets our health care needs.

Ok, so, after we're married, my wife calls the Social Security Administration and lets them know about the change in her status, which results in a change in her disability allowance, and she also informs them that she has other insurance and no longer wishes to receive Medicare. End of story, right?

Wrong.

The first true hint that something's wrong is when my insurance refuses to pay medical bills because she's on Medicare. We thought we'd taken care of that. Apparently once the government starts giving you money, it's tough to get them to stop. So she makes another call and requests to be unenrolled from Medicare. End of story?

Not hardly.

We get a statement showing that, in fact, Medicare has been being billed for various medical expenses. Now, we've told various hospitals and physicians' offices that she doesn't have Medicare, that, if she's listed as having Medicare, they should eliminate that from their files. Presumably, they do. But the real question is how the hell Medicare continues her coverage--how it actually finds her--since she changed her name when we were married and changed her name or used her new name at every medical center she's been going to for the past year and half. Amazing detective work. Maybe W. should have assigned the Social Security Administration to look for the WMDs. It could have definitively told him they weren't there, and, by gum, they should know.

So now my wife spends an hour on the phone, listening to muzak for some of the time, being transferred to another office and listening to more muzak, only to be told that she needs to complete a form and get a letter stating that she, in fact, has other insurance. I mean, on the one hand it's nice to know that they care, but, on the other, isn't the government getting just a little bit too intrusive? Seriously, if I want to fall off the grid and live in utter poverty without medical care, sleeping on the grating, shouldn't I damn well be able?

End of screed.

Resolution

2008-01-01T11:28:00.000-08:00

Who in hell thought up this peculiar
practice? Like somehow the beginning
of a new year is some kind of meaningful
milepost, like those markers they mete out
at precisely demarcated intervals along
the interstate, when all it really is
is a vagary dependent upon an artificial
measure of the span of time required
to circle the sun, approximately, which
we commemorate with hang-overs
and parades and football games. Nothing
a Bloody Mary and few aspirin can’t
cure. Drink lots of water. That said, I
can make a few resolutions—after the past
seven years, I swear to Christ and anything
else I hold even mildly sacred, I won’t—
and I mean not never—vote for a Republican
for president. May someone shoot me
right between the eyes if I even think about
breaking that one. I resolve to get angry
less and drink beer at least as often. I heartily
resolve never to make another resolution
unless somebody, somewhere, resolves
to pay me a large sum of money to lie.

Top tens

2007-12-29T10:41:00.000-08:00

People love to make lists. It’s fun and occasionally instructive. For reasons of no particular relevance, I’ve been thinking about “top ten” lists lately, and here’s what I’ve come up with in three important categories for me. In all cases, I’ve restricted myself to a single work by a particular artist and have chosen specific works rather than compilation works (e.g., greatest hits, selected poems, etc.).

(All lists are not rank ordered)

Albums

John Coltrane, Ballads
Charles Mingus, East Coasting
Coleman Hawkins Encounters Ben Webster
Art Tatum and Ben Webster, Group Masterpieces
Thelonious Monk, Live at the It Club
Dave Alvin, Blue Boulevard
Dwight Yoakam, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. (Expanded Edition)
Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (Deluxe Edition)
Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
REM, Automatic for the People

Novels

James Joyce, Ulysses
John Fowles, Daniel Martin
John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues
James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Peter Matthiessen, Killing Mister Watson
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Larry Woiwode, Beyond the Bedroom Wall
Vladimir Nobokov, Pale Fire
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier

Poetry

Hayden Carruth, Brothers, I Loved You All
Jack Gilbert, Monolithos
Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
Robert Frost, North of Boston
Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos
Kenneth Rexroth, The Phoenix and the Tortoise
Jim Harrison, Letters to Yesenin
Galway Kinnell, The Past
Muriel Rukeyser, The Gates
David Lee, Porcine Canticles

Grammar and guns

2007-12-29T08:39:00.000-08:00

The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is one of the most controversial. That controversy will doubtless be fueled by the recent decision of the Supremes to revisit the meaning and extent of this amendment in their upcoming session. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Adam Freedman discusses the role of punctuation in understanding the intent of the amendment, in particular the use of commas. The amendment contains "three of the little blighters," though Freedman concentrates his argument on the second comma.

The actual language of the amendment, however, suggests that all three commas constitute problems in terms of grammatical sense:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

At first glance, the first and second commas seem to mark a nonrestrictive phrase modifying "Militia." If we remove that nonrestrictive phrase, which we should be able to do without altering the grammatical sense of the sentence, the sentence, in fact, makes no sense:

A well regulated Militia the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall
not be infringed.

Adding a comma after "Militia" only serves to clarify the nonsensical nature of this construction. "A well regulated Militia" only makes sense if we include "being necessary to the security of a free State."

The full nature of the opening phrase as a conditional is clear when we remove the first comma:

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

If we remove the opening qualifying phrase (as the NRA so often does, not wishing to deal with the burden of explaining away the beginning of the amendment), "the right of the people" has no condition. That, however, is not the way that the framers intended the language to read.

The whole question of the value of commas in understanding the meaning of the language is completely recontextualized when we look at the third comma. This comma separates the subject of the main clause from the predicate, and thus is completely ungrammatical. Freedman notes that eighteenth century writers did not understand the "rules" of punctuation the way we do today, so we can't put too much weight on "the little blighters." Commas were largely rhetorical in their function rather than grammatical, so commas were placed wherever the writer felt a pause was called for.

Anyone with a smidge of sense should be able to see that the right to own weapons without restriction is entirely dependent upon the need for "a well regulated Militia." The capitalization of "Militia" may not entirely be the era's propensity for capitalizing words for emphasis since that same capital-m Militia occurs elsewhere in the Constitution--Article I, Section 8, and Article II, Section 2. The sense of Militia is clearly tied to state-organized groups that were, before we had a standing military, absolutely necessary to maintaining security. Such groups remained in force until 1903 when the Militia Act created the National Guard, which pulled all state militias together under federal authority. This would seem to render the need for individual citizens to maintain arms without restriction null and void.

And the Supremes have largely upheld this view, most recently in 1939. Despite the NRA's massively funded argument to the contrary, the Constitution, particularly the Second Amendment, does not provide the blanket right to unrestricted gun ownership. In fact, it's questionable that the Second Amendment provides any protection for individual citizens to own guns at this time.

The smart money goes to the Ninth Amendment, that shining gem:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be
construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

We've already learned to ignore commas in the framers' language, so we have an amendment that says, essentially, "the people" have any rights that are not expressly forbidden. That includes gun ownership. The question of restriction depends entirely upon laws, and those laws may restrict gun ownership, but those restrictions--from a strictly practical point of view--should not be too restrictive. We have a history of more than two hundred years of gun ownership by individuals, and only a self-destructive legislative or judicial body would attempt to restrict gun ownership entirely.

That does, however, leave room to mandate proper care and storage of firearms (e.g., use of trigger locks) and to outlaw ownership of ordnance with no lawful purpose (e.g., machine guns, bazookas, assault rifles). Pennsylvania is one of the states in which the bar on owning a handgun is pretty low (maybe too low; you can walk out of a store with a handgun in less than an hour--hardly enough time for the blood to cool if you're passionately determined to shoot your cheating spouse), so I own a handgun. I'm a law-abiding citizen with no criminal record and no history of violent instability. Under the Ninth Amendment, I assert my right to own my guns, and I'm not about to give them up--especially not when such well-regulated militia-like organizations like Aryan Nation and Posse Comitatus are running around with theirs.

The incovenient convenience

2007-12-28T11:10:00.000-08:00

How quickly we become acclimated to changes in technology. The pervasiveness of cell phones today often causes me to wonder how people did without these things that seem attached to their ears. What do they have to talk about that occupies them for such long periods of time? Were things so much less important a dozen years ago?

But I digress. I've gotten as used to technological convenience as the next guy (depending, I suppose, on who that next guy is), including the ability to pay my bills online. Car loan, auto insurance--all paid online. Since Comcast provides my cable, telephone, and internet, that's one easy payment. Who needs stamps? Well, suddenly, payment to Comcast isn't quite so easy. The company's retooled their access to bill paying, and I seem to have fallen into a massive glitch in the new program. I can't log-in to my account, which means I can't pay my bills, and I've spent--quite literally--several hours on the phone, sometimes on hold but often working with a series of frustrated customer service representatives and technicians who are unable to figure out exactly how to get me into my account so that I can pay my bill.

How easy to take ease for granted--until, of course, the technology fails. If worse comes to worst, I've still got actual paper checks and a stamp.

No snowflake falls

2007-12-27T13:01:00.000-08:00

Zen Master Obaku in one of his sermons notes that no snowflake falls in an appropriate place. If we take this at its word, it suggests a very different way of being in the world. I like to think of this in more direct terms: whatever happens happens because that's the only way it could happen; if it could've happened another way, it would have. Not particularly consoling words, perhaps, but then I've never been entirely certain that the purpose of religion is to comfort. I'm not certain Jesus had consolation in mind when he told the crowd that only those who were themselves without sin should stone another. I doubt very much that, when the crowd dispersed, the members left feeling very comforted.

Zen is about living in the moment, or so the backporch platitudes tell us, but being in the moment also means understanding that we are in this particular moment because everything in our lives brought us here. Karma, which essentially preconditions the terms of our existence, gives us a place to start. That's it. What we do with what we've got to start with may be constrained by that origination, but it doesn't preclude much by way of how we conduct ourselves along this path.

One way I explain conditioned origination is to liken it to a house. When tenants leave, the house remains as it was following the way they used it. If they held rock'n'roll parties and smashed the windows out, that's what the next tenant inherits. He can ignore the squalor and spend his time thinking about other things, or he can work to clean the place up and repair the windows. He can leave it a much better place than he moved into. And the house progresses from tenant to tenant, each worsening the place, leaving it pretty much the same, or working to make it better.

That's our choice entirely. If this doesn't make sense, just think about Stephen Hawking. If you feel like you can't get a break, yeah, think about Stephen Hawking. What have you done to rehabilitate your life today? Can you understand that each moment--this moment--is everything you've done to make it what it is? Can you live it like there's no other choice, bringing your all into now. This now. And this.

I'm dreaming of a mild Christmas

2007-12-25T08:28:00.000-08:00

A mild enough day--temperature in the fifties, the sunniest day we've had in a week. This is not the Christmas of my childhood. We had serious snow in those days. Feet of it, several times each winter. Enough snow that my backyard was heaped with snow deep enough to tunnel through pretty much from early to mid-November until early April, at the least.

When I moved to far northern New York--the real North Country, north of the Adirondack Mountains--the snow was even more extreme. Summer, we used to say (sort of joking), was the one bad week of ice-skating in August. Snow from early October all the way into May. Then, further south, but into the country of lake-effect snow, snow storms in Syracuse and Ithaca were monumental--like climate, rather than paltry seasons. At least once every year we'd have an ice storm of the sort Frost describes in "Birches." The ice would coat everything, sometimes as much as an inch of absolutely clear ice. The slender branches of trees sheathed. Roads so treacherous you drove slowly--if you drove at all--and even that was no guarantee that you wouldn't skid uncontrollably.

Now, here in southeastern Pennsylvania, winter becomes increasingly less winterly. I remember shortly after I moved here a few monster storms, but not so much so these days. A couple of years ago we had a nice blizzard that left a foot or more of snow, but that was a couple of years ago, and we've had little snow since.

Most people dream of going to Florida when they retire; not me. Give me Montana, the Rockies, the space--absolute dumps of pure white snow.

I wrote this poem for Thanksgiving, but it fits today, as well:

Sixty Degrees

and they call this Thanksgiving. Good God,
when I was a child we often ploughed through
snow to walk to my great-aunt and -uncle’s house,
my father’s appetite whetted by the sweat
expended to shovel our double-wide driveway
the whole way across and heave the wet
snow over the white picket fence into a small
chain of mountains in the backyard. I step
outside to bring in wood for the fire we won’t
need tonight and I’m warm in the tee-shirt
and pajama bottoms. Sandal weather in the second
half of November. You can’t even call it
Indian Summer; we’ve had not even a week’s
worth of weather that qualifies as fall, two mornings
when the far slope glittered with frost, and mist
spread from the ponds and rose in ghostly
corkscrews into the morning sun. I’ve heard
that in twenty years all the ski resorts in New England
will be closed because winter temperatures won’t
ever drop enough for it to snow. I used to say
I wanted to retire in Montana—wide expanses of
land,the jagged peaks of the Rockies, and all that sky
curved so high and wide you know that it
won’t ever stop—and, of course, the cold and
the snow—deep snow, drifts high as a barn that
last until late spring. Jesus. Jesus. I guess I’d better
consider making that final move to Alaska.

'Twas the night before Christmas

2007-12-24T12:40:00.001-08:00

If I try, I can remember the excitement I used to feel as we approached Christmas. Christmas Eve was almost unbearable. I'm not entirely certain how I managed to sleep, though whatever sleep I managed was for a very short time. My parents established a hard and fast rule about how early I could wake them, so I watched the sky gradually lighten at my curtained window until the time arrived.

The bounty always lay scattered like gemstones in a fantasy around the tree, soon enough piles of paper and ribbons and bows. Then came the befuddlement of trying to play with several toys simultaneously. Lunch and dinner were breaks I didn't want to take and suffered through the time I was required to sit at the table. Then back to the living room and the bubbling lights on the tree.

Once we started traveling to see my mother's family on Christmas morning, the true excitement moved to Christmas Eve. Once dinner was finished and the plates were dried and neatly stacked, we'd move to the living room, and I got to play Santa, distributing presents to my parents and-of course--to myself.

When I had children of my own, Christmas regained some of that shine, and I instituted the tradition of one of my sons handing around the presents, everyone waiting while each present was opened and admired.

Now my sons are full grown, and Christmas lacks mystery and wonder for me. My Jewish wife now gets excited at all the activity she missed out on for most of her life, but even that isn't enough to inspire me. I've been Rinzai Zen Buddhist for more than a dozen years, so Christmas has absolutely no religious significance to me. It's another time I get together with my sons and sometimes my step-children and grandson, though my wife's children usually have other plans. I see the purely mercantile face of the holiday, stripped of any real sense of wonder at something beyond gifts--wrapped up stuff.

Bah-humbug. Sometimes I think we need a little more Scrooge to balance out the gluttony and greed that run without restraint.