Reviewed: December Poems by Ben Mazer. Publisher: Pen & Anvil, 5/16. Paperback $11.95, 60pp.

Reviewed: The Glass Piano by Ben Mazer. Publisher: MadHat, 10/15. Paperback $21.95, 186pp.

Home // July.1.2016 // Paul Rowe and Daniel Simonds in conversation

Ben Mazer’s Luxuriant Madness

Daniel Simonds: "Why do the lovers speak if not to disturb and unsettle eternal darkness?" asks Ben Mazer. May I compare Mazer's sonnets to Lowell's in their infuriatingly leisured archness, a "waking in morning to pearls in a coffee can," an ivory quality that charms the heart with its sheer ostentation of virtuosity; or elsewise what are his lines but sonorific "Epithalamiums," or honorific, if abidingly honorable, songs to the bride and bridegroom, despite their subsequent "wedding in the house of Frankenstein," to "welcome stranger hosts / into the private parlor that they went / to resurrect the fabric, bright and pure," which is to say of Mazer's poems: they are allusively metrical and rigorous in their placidly spliced reconstructions, crystalline couplings, and marmoreal rewinds of Eliot's and Ransom's rhythms.

Mazer's opaquely glass-like "Poetry. has to break apart its precepts / to come in full force, if it ever comes again," and therefore exists wildly free of the heaviness and fragmentation usually associated with a high lyricism, this time one sung to and from the common bard of common prayer and common love, so as to be rather "wedded" wonderfully, thus letting its "entelechy" or fully realized "Philosophy assert a rift in happiness that any man would treasure, / grown independent of his eccentric leisure, / stinging the early promise of his gift."

Paul Rowe: Ben Mazer's latest collection, December Poems, summons lovers of poetry to amble with a masterful bard "right through the gate of stars, / never to go back, inconsolable." Readers of Mazer continually encounter threads of deeply personal, somnolent memories interlaced with resonant, portentous imagery capable of powerfully triggering the imagination. Mazer spins a demanding, yet infinitely rewarding, lyric web for the sensitive imagination; to lift a phrase from Thomas Graves, the "pleasant drowning quality" of his poems is at once listless and ecstatic.

December Poems contains perhaps the most subjective, even the most Romantic, lyric poetry of our age. Mazer's victory depends on his meticulous commitment to craft and, to appropriate Wordsworth, the "visionary gleam" of his prescience that seems to instantiate the poet's deepest thoughts despite the tension emerging from their incommensurable relationship to the reality of the poet's life.

The result of this tension is the creation of a superlative "lyric reality"—one that enters Mazer into a lineage of lyrici vates including Landis Everson and John Crowe Ransom: poets who performatively accomplish the acts to which their poems refer. The most powerful achievement of December Poems is its overarching thematic petition that readers augment a more thorny attitude towards love, one that originates only from the finest perception of poetic form. Form itself is an overriding contributor to Mazer's impact; not surprisingly then, meaning and form are indistinguishable in December Poems.

What Christopher Bock has eloquently deemed Mazer's "tautness of form" is by no means strictly compressive, but rather attains an accelerated unfettering of expression into a perfected poetics that dreamily puzzles readers into the simultaneous push backwards and forwards to the gates of the primal causation of lyric utterance. These astonishing "drownings" as they were, these cryptic impressions, are suffused with virtuosic musicality: impressions of unfading suspense linger for readers long after they have departed from the melody of Mazer's lyric reality.

Daniel Simonds: How does the musicality of Mazer's rich-rhyming lines tend toward an upending or a "rift" of a given poem's expectations, one that is counter-intuitively modernized, inclusive, and luxuriantly so? Mazer is like Auden in that there is an underlying sense of unctuous lightness in his metrics attached to his larger themes: how does one account for all this? Well, for one thing, such arrives via "The nightingale's sublunar par... in such a shiny Rolls Royce car," the poem in question glancing back at itself over a quatrain and a half later, "where wonder seals the heart / beyond routes of the metro bus," thus progressing public to private and back again with a sense of having "stood / enjambed in questioning stances," which is to say, December Poems are fine-spun "Christmas carols sung in the abyss."

Or else you're riding elegantly on his "Euclid Avenue," a major street in Cleveland, a road that one discovers is as important as 5th Avenue in terms of connecting all walks of life—and thus his knowledge of geographical outliers and cultural throwbacks makes Mazer paradoxically "au courant"—inasmuch as he is a "savage bibliophile," a cartographer of the mind's localizing elations, "Sitting in Boston pretending [he's] in London," and where Mazer's esteemed editor and fellow poet "Umit Singh Dhuga must be near. Royal."

Paul Rowe: Speaking of Umit Singh Dhuga, in order to bring to bear some light on Mazer's poetic vision, I've asked Umit to answer a couple of questions for this review; thankfully, he was kind enough to provide some illuminating thoughts on Mazer's editorial vision.

PR: How has Mr. Mazer's editorial work transformed the identity of The Battersea Review? What inspired you to appoint him to his current position as Editor?

USD: Ben Mazer is mentally indefatigable. His formalist sensibilities translate in his attention to form: hence the rather easy decision to appoint him to the position of Editor of The Battersea Review. Mazer's thematic approach toward particular issues devoted to particular socio-cultural spaces of poetics is brilliantly unique to Mazer and a signature of his editorial nous.

PR: To your mind, how does Mr. Mazer's editorial work inform his poetry, and in turn, how does his poetry shape his editorial vision?

USD: Ben exacts precision in his own poetry: witness the number of sonnets he produces with alacrity at no expense of acuity. Mazer's decisiveness informs his every metrical decision, and this same decisiveness informs his ability sharply to cull, cut, or reject, qua editor, what poetry and/or critical prose is before him.

Daniel Simonds: Mazer's architectonic ability to both erect and perform with a prismatic simultaneity The Glass Piano—in a sublimity of echo across his titular collection—represents a decisive theoretical (and theatrical) performance of form which could easily be "blent" or not blended the right way—but which Mazer designs and plays to the utmost precision. Thus, do you think he perceives of the sonnet as a cosmic pulsating mirror unto itself—matching its images to their shadowy reflections—especially in terms of a doubling of inimitable rhyme, meter, and theme?

Paul Rowe: In terms of envisaging the reflection of poetic inspiration through form, Mazer's interview with Robert Archambeau in the Afterword to The Glass Piano divulges the poet's own thoughts on theoretical mirroring. Mazer suggests that the opening lines of his poems are received intuitively, that these lines "come as naturally as leaves to a tree," yet visionary poets tend to "offer" their intuitions "guidance through an act of intense concentration on where. the poem must lead, or upon some symbolic image or emotion" that the poet intuits as the heart of the poem.

After reflecting on Mazer's own thoughts on process, it is essential to sit down to a second reading of The Glass Piano. Mazer's own ruminations on the "voices" of poetic inspiration are manifested by his projects; his work becomes at turns jubilantly animated and gut-wrenching by the generosity with which he guides his intuition. Mazer's poems prompt readers to quest for moments of "significant emotion," images or turns of phrase that opened up for the poet along the way, fragments of memories that were deeply felt and called for more of his fine constructions. To put it another way, Daniel, if this "doubling" you mention is the process by which Mazer intuits and expands his received signals through a process of mirroring in his own mind, readers might delight in seeking out fissures from which "significant emotions" burst through.

Mazer's carefully planted interlinear phonic echoes give credence to his semantic mirroring. To your mind, how does rhyme itself contribute to the thematic project of The Glass Piano, a collection through which death and love pervades?

Daniel Simonds: Mazer is a "midnight" rider for whom rhyme principally proceeds "tier on tier," as formalizations of metrics and place return efficiently, "like lightning to enlighten me," mostly unscathed, though not yet unreturned from larger realms of unrestrained thought and music, having escaped the "sessile thrust of dying combinations" in order to

Never. go back, inconsolable, / now broken lie upon a love-wrecked ship / of Motion in staticity, staticity in motion / where friends collapse, cite broken bits of language, / and string together this, hurt in new love.

Elsewise, Mazer can loosen the turntables on us, making the news William Carlos Williams pleads for become suddenly clear to those who, unbeknownst to themselves, were made to feel uncomfortably public or implicated by that selfsame news; relieving those people whom are burdened by the news with a lushness of fresh sound, those whom otherwise have "a season maddening in their head," or those whom are of "a cream of youth, / not broken yet by a devastating truth," those for whom "lords and ladies bumbling attire / promoted much desire and much ire," and whom may now reside in objectionable networks against their will, as in the poem "Mad Ireland," which itself has "hurt me into poetry too," but which nevertheless connects everyone to the rhymed remnants of the cyclically repeating and newsworthy anthropocentric—at least by the terms of what saved them or vice versa:

Whales with wave-shaken lanterns / in their stomach pit, / receive the last land broadcast / in a storm and say goodnight / lashed by rain, whipped by fright / in the deepening, darkening night.

Who has ever so particularly imagined a breeching whale as "lashed" by rain, and yet meanwhile made it an image of languidness, even as the seas submerge "the last land broadcast," moreover a metaphor for crossing that threshold between private and public, above water or below water or in between, that at once (un)-comfortable place of ancient ennui and modern eccentric energy, its darkling melodies suddenly similar to the smoothly "widening gyre" of Yeats?

Paul Rowe: December Poems continues, even improves upon, what you call the "languidness" of Mazer's transcendent lyric voyage with a torpid display of lush phonic mastery that thrives on the friction between listless wanderlust and a true bard's unmitigated thirst for exactitude. Mazer's "Prologue" pulsates with the embodied rhythms of contrary emotions that rupture from encounters between one's most plaintive and insatiable hopes and one's most carefully laid plans. Mazer's "unrequited longing, that you might / read what [he] wrote, and know then what [he] felt, / like flutes upon an aztec ship of longing," is ultimately reciprocated, poem after poem, within his efficaciously rendered lyric realm.

Mazer's dexterous performance of Pound's command to "make it new" is uncanny, as exhibited by "Christmas Lights." Here, readers partake in a car ride where "a billboard flashes, / [and] roadside bars flash by," where nostalgic images are reanimated by surrealist brush strokes and our thematic stockpile of Americana is uncloaked as "a half glimpsed library" where significant emotion seeps through cracks "between the thick set trees," the very trees themselves "strange divisions of eternities."

Mazer's revivification of cultural imagery is a major part of his project. What do you make of his references to popular culture throughout The Glass Piano and December Poems? How do these references graciously contribute to the languid character of his recent work?

Daniel Simonds: By the play of popular culture, if one predominately literary, as in the title "Berryman at Columbia," Mazer is one of Frank O'Hara's loftiest counterparts, crafting a high poetic for a "deafened" culture; one, however, that's been revived and re-tuned by Mazer from the overly ironic and low to the "truly beautiful jazz piano that sums up a New York evening," yet another glass piano whose outline, inner workings, and silhouette are alternatively described depending on how you see and hear it, and are that which makes him an overwhelmingly public poet, one who importunes us to "come out, come out, / [since] time hath no fury like a delayed lover," to hear his songs.

Mazer's glass piano is doubly one of a profusely arcane, highly emotional, and capable self-knowledge: there exists a lightness when one knows oneself or composes poems about oneself without any other sort of outside qualifier but one's own way of conducting in "pilfered surplices" an ecstatic "citing," an accessing of an aggrandizing humility of language that flourishes not necessarily with an eye to oneself but within a mirrored framework—a spiritual fanciness of outlook toward one's objects or fellow beings—all in order to ensure, in The Glass Piano, that

Words are just words
unless their combination
alert the fabric of the senses to
the deeper issues that the spirits rue
in images like carpets of northern snow
blinding out time and making the old new
so then words are like a snowman talking
to the icy breath of god that skirts the powder soft and glittering.

Above is Mazer at his "sublunary" best: his humanity interweaved as an abstraction so that one may notice what it means to harness the "concrete" as a "ship" of the movable, that which is "collapsible," condensed into units of a lavishly lyrical love, a relationship otherwise collapsed as opposed to merely "inconsolable," yet ornately comforted by "a candle.[of] surmise / the wonder in our gleaming eyes / cast into an eternity / of love's bright, eternal sympathy."

Hence, one might see these poems—in being sacrificially inclined in their spending of sheer lyricism—as concerted love songs to the "devil planted in his head," so as to let us remain not

scared to go to bed, / and hold the covers tightly over [one's] head, / calling her voice in murmurs and in whispers, / weeping a long time in the silver sled / of sleep [which] shall take me sliding into dreams./ till I wake with fear and panic; while she lies beautiful and epiphanic.

Here Mazer transfers the beauty of his abundant lyricism to his audience, perhaps so that we do "not hear [his] heart break."

Paul Rowe: Mazer's inimitable phonic rhapsodies seamlessly integrate his grand themes of cathartic passions, unrequited loves, the inescapability of death, and the identity forming potentials that emerge from the crevasses between ritualized worship and the most profoundly singular human sentiments. The contiguity between phonic echo and meaning is absolutely essential to Mazer's graceful poetic execution. Time and again, Mazer's metaphors are amplified by sound effects to enhance, or indicate, semantic nuances that bridge the various images that constitute his creative matrix. The interlinear rhymes of "X" illustrate Mazer's knack for employing assonantal rhymes to reinforce the sense of dissonance arising from the coalescence between romantic pursuit and divine assurance; Mazer's rhymes carry over at both regular and non-sequential intervals, lending his latest batch of poems an undeniably elegant balance of variation and repetition:

Christmas comes with newspapers and darkness down,
the Christmas that each Christmas light avers
when the bell begins tolling, heaving at the levers,
you eye them with a frown, the graveyards rolling
till all the sun goes down, a fresh bell tolling
and the increase in wattage in the town
is Christ's fresh killing, candle lights go up
to brighten the brass rims of from which we sup,
we are the stuff from which the plots are wrung.
I don't believe the midnight will be sung
upon the golden footage like an aria
which weeps the tears from candles when I marry you
and shows from space the axis of earth's orbit,
as if Christ's burning passion could be torpid.

Mazer's three syllable bursts of "newspapers" and the alliterative "darkness down" compliment his choice end-rhymes "light avers" and "at the levers," the "down" of line one repeated in lines four and five before their respective caesuras, eventually leaping forth to conclude the sonnet's sixth line. Similarly, "the bell begins tolling" in line three to knell through the "fresh bell tolling" of line five where Mazer's ritualized desire confronts the institutionalized muse. The end rhyme "darkness down" of line one brilliantly finds its mate with "the increase in wattage in the town," to augment the holiday's ambivalent transmutations from darkness to light, the sudden glare unveiled as "Christ's fresh killing," the human players "the stuff from which the plots are wrung," itself a clever allusion to Shakespeare. Mazer sings to defy "Christ's burning passion" with his own "torpid" longing, declaring in his next poem:

If man loved woman more, then let me burst,
and let the holiest of vows be cursed.

Here Mazer strikes up his delicate symphony, demanding remembrance in the hearts of his readers. Mr. Mazer has generously gifted lovers of poetry with a series of poems that reanimate past emotions through visionary bolts that strike meaning through with rare musicality. To encounter this level of poetic virtuosity is to suddenly acquire, and marvel at, one's sudden awareness of the cavernous linkages of sound and feeling transmitted by a master poet; straightaway one feels permitted to weep.

Banner graphic source: untitled photograph (Orpheus with a lyre?) by George H. Seeley. The J. Paul Getty Museum (84.XM.163.3). In the public domain.