In which the author calls out the excessive self-involvement of contemporary American poetry, and asks: Where are the Yeatses, the Eliots, the Audens of today?
1.
There is a narrowness to American poetry among its best-known practitioners that defies easy explanation. It should be up to poets, more than even prose writers, to express through the infinite malleability of the English language, the percipient, raw, uncontrolled, uncalculated emotions of the audience, as well as those that need merely a touch of imagistic precision to become alive and dancing metaphors for the audience to take away and play with. In poetry, there are fewer cause-and-effect limitations to abide by, and the imaginative world can bring together all sorts of supposedly inconsistent systems of thought and logic and action that realistic fiction writers must be careful to keep apart. Instead, the contemporary American poet has constructed a zone of comfort to inhabit perpetually, choosing to restrict himself to articulating private sorrows and occasional joys in language that does not inspire, in metaphors that do not invigorate the life beyond the page, and in rhetoric that suggests a closing in, a shutting down of means and ends, rather than an opening up to the excitements and thrills that might be beyond the immediate ken of the hemmed-in, meagerly rewarded poet.
When confessional poets confess, they do so with the pleasureless bluntness of surgeons limited to premodern tools, expecting nothing but agonizing, bleeding deaths on the operating table. Others who play tricks with language, as intriguing as the effects sometimes might be, eviscerate any notion of a meaning beyond the performative capability of language itself, thus reducing both language and its consequences to manageable levels. Nearly all have forsaken keen knowledge of public figures, public events, and public history, so that even when forced on occasion to confront a large-scale tragedy (usually it's this which obligates the contemporary poet to pen a few lines to "deal with" the crisis, rather than a Whitmanesque exposition that embraces the good and the free, before calamity strikes), the poet approaches it strictly through the screen of private experience. An example is the angry collection Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets (Melville House, 2002), where it's as if Osama bin Laden had stirred a hornet's nest among usually complacent poets, who've offered back to him emotions designed not to outlast the moment, and who refuse to be anything but unheroic observers in the global tragedy that's sure to unfold from the climactic moment on.
Imagine for a moment the alternative of approaching private experience through the prism of public experience, which may be said to have been the aesthetic of some of the leading modernists, and certainly many of those preceding them. One can chart a decline even in confessional poetry, from the vast historical ambition of Lowell, to the institution of the lachrymose self as the central (ahistorical) figure in Plath, to the display of mere histrionics in Sexton. Education gets progressively limited in the expectation of what it can do. For most poets today, the ideal is poetry that barely reaches the level of passable prose, and seeks nearly always to underwhelm and underimpress. With few exceptions, humor, and its more refined cousin wit, are nearly extinct presences in American poetry. The occasional bursts of humor in some poets known for this quality seem meant to buttress the helplessness of the privately operating protagonist, rather than channel energy back and forth between the individual and his culture, thus strengthening both. Satire, the stooped uncle with wilts on his back, has been utterly homeless for some time.
The work of leading poets like Sharon Olds, Jorie Graham, Louise Glück, Philip Levine, and others embodies their self-perception as individuals of very small means (both in terms of life choices and language choices), satisfied to arrive at over-subtle explosions of cheap fireworks in a boyish age of theft and gloom and self-doubt, rather than orchestrating for an adoring, mature Independence Day assemblage the rousing fireworks of an expensively organized world culture, appropriating and redeploying nationalism, liberalism, and imperialism toward more satisfying ends.
The rule of self-censorship is faithfully observed, lest the poet's language and emotion become a threat to anyone but his narrow academic audience. One often sees poets within reach of the capacity to make connections and links that might shed light on diverse worlds of experience, but then withdraw in favor of a rigid compartmentalization of perception and sensibility. If a poet's mother suffers from breast cancer or his father is institutionalized for Alzheimer's, that is all the experience means, the nuts-and-bolts and grimy nitty-gritty of the evolving story itself, nothing beyond it: the reigning aesthetic is to blank out implication and responsibility from the individual's minute cloister of a view to the world.
2.
Sharon Olds's poetry is an excuse to exemplify extreme biological determinism, of a sort that has no patience for humanist platitudes of any sort. The circumscribed world of breast, nipple, cunt, and penis is meant to draw the reader in, at the explicit cost of shunning connections between the mind and the body: this is a bleak, repressive, bewitched world where the Cartesian interaction of body and mind has not yet made an appearance. The body speaks for itself, as its own self-contained, vulturous, enervating, troublesome entity, and must be replenished with the essence of spirit, leaving the poor, fragile vehicle-the man or woman-with nothing but exhaustion to mark his days. Olds succeeds in assimilating various radials of corporeal experience into a sharp, singular point of focus: the death of man, man as subject, man as matter of will. The poets got there first; they were the first to reach the mountaintop of the nipple, the mound of the belly, to persuade prudent prose writers: shame is a quality of humanness; adopt it and risk snickers from the world-weary.
Typical of her contemporaries, Olds remains shamelessly loyal to the exact same brand of form and content throughout her oeuvre: over a quarter century, the stylistic variation is non-existent, suggesting the penetration of determinism in the very interpretation of unvarying experience (each leading American poet is a guild of one). Compare a 1978 Olds poem with one from 2004, and despite the many rites of passage that must have occurred in the meantime, the poet signals absolute disinterest in the evolution of the individual and collective mind.
When the body's functions are elevated to the level of cosmic events, both the body and its comparative point of view are cheapened. In "That Year," from her first collection Satan Says (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), menarche is compared to the first rumblings of Auschwitz in Social Studies class. The poet realizes that she is a Jew, and so "a survivor"-but twinning this consciousness with that of menstruation deletes the guiding emotion behind the poem, if there is any: is one as much of a survivor for having a period as for being a Jew? Who knows! "Night Terrors" assure her that "there is no/ chance of survival," and yet survive she does, to write poems that were they written by a man would have been censored for their compelling sense of inactive hatred toward the assemblage of flesh that is woman: "she's a hole in space," as Olds says in "Tricks." In a typical Olds poem, there is gratuitous piling on, to achieve an effect familiar to spectators of the new media: a numbing of senses, a bothersome questioning of the heart: Is this really going on? Can she really be saying this? It's not because she, the poet, is not ashamed of seeing herself in this corporeally defined way, but am I, the reader, tough enough to get into a psyche so reduced to anatomy?
In these early poems, the characteristic Olds tum at the end-a nugget of small wisdom, utterly unobjectionable from even a rebellious teenager's point of view-already appears frequently, as if to deny the poem's preceding sense of pointlessness. In "Feared Drowned," the concluding piece of faux wisdom is: "Once you lose someone it is never exactly/ the same person who comes back." Here, as in her unvarying disruptive enjambments-always end the line at the verb, the adjective, the preposition, if you can-the poet is drawing attention to herself as the poetess: an un-old princess of survivorship, who at every tum refuses the taste of what used to pass in earlier decades as revolt: as in "Late," where the poet is "tired," Friedan-like, of "the women doing dishes" and of women wanting to feel men's "hard cocks" against themselves, but where she concludes: "We are sealed in. The only way out is through/ fire, and I do not want a single/ hair of a single head singed." Well, we imagine escaping unscathed to that extent is an impossibility, so the poet shall remain sealed in.
In the earlier poems like "The Housewives Watching Morning TV," "The Love Object," "Young Mothers I," "Encounter," and "Fishing off Nova Scotia," there is at least some consciousness of sheer existential dread, which lends the poems some interest, but which the poet later in her career completely abandons in favor of the self-sufficiency of prurience turned inward. The narrative crux in Olds's poems becomes less and less interested in inviting readers toward a feeling of universal significance: the poet's experience is hers only, and it can be related, but expect nothing of a relation, let alone understanding. Striving for universalism, after all, is the great bugaboo of the academic establishment. An early indication of the extremes to which Olds will carry the relentless exclusion of the reader from participating in some universal absorption is evident in "Fish Story," where the mother "eyeballing the slick girl," her "firm/ slit a noncommittal fish mouth/ smiling neither way," is observed as not having any self-aspiration to commonness. The boys and girls and husbands and fathers are possessed in extremity by the poet, so exclusively and intimately that the reader's perception is made irrelevant from the outset.
The last poem in Satan Says, "Prayer," sets the stage for perhaps Olds's greatest obsession in all the rest of her work, the expulsion of the child through the vagina: "let me not forget:/ each action, each word/ taking its beginning from these." And it is significant that it is the infant's "gleaming sex" that emerges from her own contracting sex that immobilizes the poet into a lifetime of self-mystification by way of self-exploration, limited strictly to the body.
In "The Issues (Rhodesia, 1978)," from The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984), Olds declares her independence from cold objectivity, beginning with "Just don't tell me about the issues," and concluding with "Don't speak to me about/ politics. I've got eyes, man." The eyes can only take you so far, as Olds demonstrates in poem after poem, her perception lingering on her father's penis as he sits on the toilet, her son's cock at different stages of growth, and her daughter's evolving mound as she develops through the years, all providing opportunities for the daughter/wife/mother to eliminate prurience from our vocabulary, raise it to the level of the only aesthetic around.
Indeed, in Olds's oeuvre, there is never a real presence of the outside world: when the poet is not observing body parts, fragile or rushing, dormant or aggressive, she seems at a loss. When she does take a dispirited stab at including the outside world, as in the opening poems of the Gold Cell (Knopf, 1987), she can only come up with sensationalistic carnage stolen from eighties television, including "The Abandoned Newborn" and "Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor,' lame attempts she soon gives up to return to building fantasies of having been tortured herself in "The Chute" (far better to talk about that than hungry Ugandan children); resuming the construction of the evil father as the displaced arena of all politics, as in "The Blue Dress"; giving voice to the attention-craving baby-boomer assuming the forgiving posture in "After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood"; and drilling our senses with her heavy-handed biological determinism in "This" (the female's breasts and cunt are all; the men process through these apparatus in quick order, helpless as her). This is when she's not building early paranoia-machines that describe all of the external order as a cumulation of threats compiled to hurt her daughter, a search for the ubiquitous "evil/ in the human heart" that has made her generation complicit in giving us the modem surveillance state: in "The Quest," when she passes by buildings, she can only sense inside them "rope,/ ironing-boards, sash, wire,/ iron-cords," that can exploit her daughter as "a raw target."
The claim is often made in pop psychology that men are good at compartmentalization; in the new (anti?)-feminist poetry produced by female poets, compartmentalization is carried to its limits. Unable to talk about the rest of her own life apart from the quadrangle of nipple, cunt, breast, and penis, Olds thinks that meditations on death equal regurgitations of scenes of death seen on television or books of photography. Once this digression into memorialized deaths is quickly over, the poet can return to her understanding of life. "The Family" portion of The Dead and the Living includes the emergence of her older sister's breasts clearing the way for the poet's own and thus protecting her, and "The Children" portion includes watching her son as "he shakes himself dry, cock tossing like a/ horse's white neck" in "Six-Year-Old Boy," and noticing "the precise/ stem-mark" of her growing daughter's sex in "Pajamas."
If it's not the outside world encroaching on her fortress-like family, the poet herself toys with the idea of predation in all its forms. Constructing the most vampirish fantasy in recent literary work in The Father (Knopf, 1992), Olds wallows in every bodily extremity imaginable, in the drawn-out death of the father figure. The entire book is one episode after another of what the poet thinks such a death might be like, in all its minute details; it is one of the most inauthentic literary deaths, because its only intent is to show off the poet's prowess in violating every rule of good taste, decency, privacy.
What can be the end result of such obsessive haunting of bodily parts-excerpted from their spiritual context-except for the infantilization of the self, a circular possessiveness, where the young poet becomes her mother's mother, and her own young daughter becomes her mother? This is precisely what happens in Olds's later work, like The Wellspring (Knopf, 1996) and Blood, Tin, Straw (Knopf, 1999). The heavenly fantasy for the poet, in "My First Weeks," from The Wellspring, now becomes imagining herself being extruded through her mother's womb. With the slight glimmerings of existential dread gone, in "For My Mother" the poet wonders: "Where does it come from, the love of babies." But the question is not addressed to the mother, it is the poet's conception of herself at seven, thinking of her mother as her "first child, really."
The same possessiveness is evident in "Parents' Day," where the child sees the arriving mother as "mine." The ego of the poet, who used to merely compare her survival of menarche to her survival as Jew, has now expanded so greatly that in "Mrs. Krikorian," she is grateful to the genocide of Armenians for sending such a good teacher as Mrs. Krikorian her way, to "save" her. Now as this child comes of age in "Necking," making out is seamlessly interrupted by images of the "rape/ and murder of our classmate," without so much as a pause. As soon as her "vagina opened,/ slowly, from within, from the top," in "First Birth," the poet knows she "was nothing, no one, I was everything to her, I was hers," her baby's toy. We have now entered the process of infinite regression. In "Physics," the poet tells us she has "not grown up/ yet, I have lived as my daughter's mother/ the way I had lived as my mother's daughter,/ inside her life."
As soon as the child is born, the genitals signal mutual, circular possession, as do all bodily elements. In "The Hand"-written in such a way as to suggest that the breaking of her son's hand is actual, not imagined, as is her characteristic ploy, whether it's talking about her identity as a Jew or her father's death-the boy's contentment is presaged by his moment of arrival in the world, when "His eyes seemed even then to focus, / as if he knew this place, or had not/ expected to know it." With this pervasive gratification with the mere fact of physical existence, the payoffs at the end of the poems get smaller and smaller, as in "The Cast," where the visitors in the hospital waiting room "smiled, the way we smile/ at a wedding, when we see the two who have been joined." Or in "The Siblings," when the older brother goes down the elevator to get his coughing little sister "a treat," which suggests that "he will accompany her down into life." In "The Transformed Boy" and "My Son the Man," the poet calmly equates her son's growing into adulthood as enslavement to the body's limitations.
As if Olds were on the same page as her fellow emotional survivors of a political world that keeps breaking in with bad news, "May 1968" is reflective of a great many poems of our era where global public experiences are reduced to subjective, private perception. Olds possesses public events in the same blind manner she possesses her father's cock and her daughter's vagina: gracious flourishes to the shape and means of her own corporeal existence. In tune with the mood of the times, "His Father's Cadaver" can only be described as poetry for the Howard Stem shock-jock age, where the body is the sum of all knowledge, and there is nothing beyond it. To call this poetry sensationalistic is a mistake: no sensation is being aspired for, as in the flat gore of the lower realms of television.
Her last collection, The Unswept Room (Knopf, 2003), represents a room so thoroughly swept up that the poet's integrity has entirely disappeared in the cleaning-out process. Apologies have become apologetics. In "The Window," there is the poet's faux acceptance of the daughter's accusation of the mother calling herself a Jew in earlier work when she's not, the poem predictably ending in equating the pain of the many dead to that of the one to whom the tragedy is only distant history.
3.
Perhaps the leading poet of the age who aspires more than anyone else to trigger no sensation whatsoever-watch her back off the moment she comes close to generating emotion of any sort-is Jorie Graham. She is the mistress of the line gone haywire, the sentence lost in clouds of pseudo-philosophical confusion, and the occasional half-hearted concrete image (her detested "thing") buried under mounds of unvisualizable, tissueless, off-putting verbal facades. Graham makes it impossible for the reader to ever get a grip on what it is she's after (she, in her extended academic note, would say this is precisely what she wants): in her poetry, opacity functions as a mutual wink between reader and poet that this is after all meaningless work, at best a distraction. Like Olds repeatedly insulting our sense of innate shame by stripping men and women of necessary cover, Graham wears down our emotional well-being by refusing language its own independent, historical, contextual place. Graham is the ideal correlate in the poetry world of American academics fascinated by mostly discredited French deconstructionists, equal purveyors of false difficulty.
Graham commits violence against language of so many sorts and with so much apparent gluttonous ease that one is tempted to give up on poetry as an ethical project altogether; and one suspects this may not be far from what her endlessly looping, excessively remonstrating, and yet pathetically simplistic and backboneless verbal fragments seek to accomplish. This is a poet who wants to remind us, in each and every poem, that verbal acquisition leads nowhere. She will take us deep into the heart of a forest and leave us stranded, without so much as a hungry wolf to occasion climax. Nothing happens in her directionless forest of only trees.
In her first collection, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (Princeton University Press, 1980), image is still tenuously present to thread volleys of casual metaphors and philosophical declaratives. But Graham's self-consciousness of the futility of the concrete as root and adhesive is evident in her misapprehending "A Feather for Voltaire":
A man full of words
is a garden of weeds,
and when the weeds grow, a garden of snow,
a necklace of tracks: it was here, my snow owl perhaps.
Who scared it away? I, said the sparrow,
with my need, its arrow. And so here I belong, trespassing, alone, in this nation of turns
not meant to be taken
I've taken.
Graham has recruited Voltaire as soul-mate in her projection of poet as lonely sparrow, taking wrong turns to no effect, flying over words that sprout as weeds. Voltaire-standing in for the enlightenment-once was, and now is no more. All is insubstantiality, so predicts Graham, self-fulfillingly.
In the opening poems of her second collection, Erosion (Princeton University Press, 1983), Graham is much farther along in her ambition to reduce the vastness and meaning of the public sphere to the random emptiness of her private world. In these poems, Graham proceeds to sever the connection between object and reflection, thing and word, the impulsion toward pragmatism. Like the deconstructionists, she echoes, in "Wood Wasps in the Spanish Willow," that "the dream of reason/ produces/ monsters." This dictum is placed within quotes, to distance the poet from accountability, but we know this is where her heart lies. There is no such ambiguity in the following poem, "Erosion":
I would not want, I think, a higher intelligence, one
simultaneous, cut clean
of sequence. No,
it is our slowness I love, growing slower,
tapping the paintbrush against the visible,
tapping the mind.
We are, ourselves, a mannerism now,
having fallen
out of the chain
of evolution.
So we grow fat with unqualified life.
Slowness is the aesthetic attitude to aspire to. Indeed, her future verbal wanderings are the paradigmatic accumulation of fat, like the American nation getting obese over the last two decades. Mannerism takes the least effort; Graham's later work seems to make a fetish of the appearance of effortlessness. We grow old, we grow fat, we grow rich: and history can't waylay us anymore.
After the first two collections, where history can still be a menacing presence at times, and not all cataclysms can be entirely reduced to the rubble of the cut-off self, Graham becomes an established poet, and abandons all restraint, entering the zone of pure excess. The common reader would be at a loss to understand whence comes the fussy, precious, ornately ignorant attitude toward history in the opening poem, "Fission," of her next collection, Region of Unlikeness (Ecco Press, 1991): Kennedy's assassination at that, an event that bonded the public, in the first fully realized spectacle of the modem age, but which the poet assimilates into inert phrasal immobility such as: "what is, what also is, what might be that is, / what could have been that is, what/ might have been that is, what I say that is,/ what the words say that is, / what you imagine the words say that is."
Arendt has famously talked about the banality of evil, the individual taking refuge in the collective will to avoid personal responsibility. When Graham recalls public memory-in "From the New World," this happens to be the pursuit of alleged Nazi criminal Ivan Demjanjuk (never hesitate to use the holocaust as your trump card, your quick entryway to emotional authenticity)-it is to file it away harmlessly, in a thicket of proof-free words, expanding in all directions, returning nowhere. The irrepressible poetics, impossible to conceive of as trespassing any rules, suggest a pervasive unaccountability, of the poet toward history, of history toward the poet, of all toward all.
"The Hiding Place," which locates itself in the cataclysmic events of Paris in 1968, is that of the fluent self, a free-floating internally propelled speech immunizing the impressionable poet from taking in any unmediated experience that might, heaven forbid, alter her. As in other poems typical of her middle period, Graham shuns the opportunity to make meaning of history and hides instead behind the responsibility-freeing scrim of simulacra: is it a "photograph" or a "news account," rather than direct perception of history, that always sways us? Now we can see that Graham's true project is to strip language of all significance, all resonance, step-by-step, methodically, like a butcher feeding his starved family: not a shred of meat must remain on the bones. Her shield of denial is summed up in "Detail from the Creation" as: "Things are like other things." In her subsequent work, Graham will deconstruct the vestiges of narrative poetry, by introducing narrative fragments with some slight connection to reality, only to bury them in proliferating abstractions, like cluster bombs taking out innocent third world babies, weapons dropped from twenty thousand feet by a poet-destroyer operating a machine on cruise control.
From now on, all of Graham's poetry is inclined to prove that no detail matters, that the choice of details to illustrate an argument is purely arbitrary. In a region where all is likeness, even metapoetry is part of a world where nothing, therefore metapoetry itself, exists, as in "Picnic": "And why should I tell this to you,/ and why should telling matter still, the bringing to life of/ listening, the party going on down there, grasses,/ voices?"
"Chaos (Eve)" is the emergent example of a perfectly nonsensical poem, with no narrative center. The arbitrary details of Christian mythology in much of Region of Unlikeness only prove that all things equal all other things, and that therefore, as in "Detail from the Creation of Man": "There's this story/ where we continue, continue, fleshy and verbal over the globe,/ talk talk, wondering what have we done ." In "The Phase After History," Graham again sums up her credo (the post-metapoetry poet must always keep summing up her project, as the only semi-worthwhile subject): "The house like a head with nothing inside./ The voice says: come in./ The voice always whispering come in, come. / Stuck on its one track." The bothersome (schizophrenic?) voices will in Graham's future poetry assume overwhelming importance: they are everywhere, commanding, instructing her to look at one thing or another, the voices knowing that there is only "wilderness/ of materialized/ meaning." The commandments will finally "make detail withdraw its hot hand,/ its competing naturalness" so that there remains "absolutely no/ story" even if there is an arbitrary sound to be made and there is "its cupful of wind that could/ transmit meaning." The voices command only to wait; meanwhile, sentences seem possible to construct and articulate for the commoners, sentences that lend America soul, despite the brutality inherent in their impulsiveness. The elite, academic poet goes on waiting, as the world bums around us.
Materialism is shunned as delusion in Graham's unironically titled Materialism (Ecco Press, 1993), which argues (if that's not too strenuous a word for Graham's project) throughout for giving up any inklings of a conclusive reality of the self. In "Steering Wheel," the poet says, "there are, there really are,/ things in the world, you must believe me," clearly suggesting, however, that there aren't. "In the Hotel" begins "1) start in the middle and 2) be self-/ effacing said the voice." How else to spurn "The day unfolding its stem materialism"? How else to declare "The author gone?" Three poems called "Notes on the Reality of the Self' suggest the unreality of the self. The reader wonders: Has the poet ever worked a day in her life? (Such is the materialist response of the great unwashed from the heartland.) Materialism is laced with gratuitous insertions of excerpts from real philosophical treatises, as if to reduce philosophy to rubble-Derrida would love this-by simply placing it in the ruins Graham has brought language to. A rude interpretation of the later Wittgenstein permeates much of this brand of poetry, which demeans the consciousness of futility by seeking over and over to rephrase it in calming terms.
In her last two books, beginning with Swarm (Ecco Press, 2000), the poetry becomes more and more image-stripped, the abstractions so abstruse as to defeat the will of the most persistent reader. The manifesto, in "from The Reformation Journal (2)," now reads: "The path of thought also now too bright/ So that its edges cut/ So that I'm writing this in the cold/ keeping the parts from finding the whole again/ page after page, unstitched, speaking for sand." Never (Ecco Press, 2002) culminates in Graham's great yearning for a unified field of infinitely parenthetical utterances, that takes in everything: prayer, empire, freedom, into a cage filling in as a hole, with nothing outside its boundaries. There is no possibility of evolution, no trace of honor of any kind, no more temptation to say "things," only "endless erasure," the credo now summarized in "Covenant" (between reader and poet?) as: "This is an age in which imagination/ is no longer all-powerful." The rhythms of Graham's poetry are now relentlessly jaunty, springy, abortive, as signs of "emergency" actually betray the absolute lack of urgency on the part of the poet, to even dissect and remove. The merest hint of narrative possibility degenerates into this drivel, in "High Tide": "it is a place/ holding a place: it is an eclipse of: of holding/on: of on: or in: or what a here can be/ if what one is/ is finally reduced to here: it is not 'now,"' and so on ad infinitum.
4.
Like Olds and Graham, Louise Glück follows the familiar trajectory of a poet with modest talents reaching for more than is possible within the ambit of her capability, and eventually taking herself too seriously and sputtering out in pseudo-profound incomprehensibility. Her first collection, Firstborn (New American Library, 1968), engaged well with the outer world, keeping the narcissism of the perplexing self at a respectful distance. Her stylistic influence then seemed to be a clean-cut Williams, her interest in the steady, yielding image consistent, and her thematics a sort of Plath for the moderately depressed.
The poems here are hard-earned, tight, and enigmatic; the reader struggles along with her (the sense of effort on her part is also palpable, generating some endearment or even sympathy from the reader) and participates in constructing a slightly off-kilter, demented, disturbing reality. The tautness of the lines makes the Plath derivation more striking, for we wonder about the pervasive feminine self-destructiveness in a psyche apparently as healthy (because outward-oriented) as Glück's. The ambition, when the poet interacts with the hard artifacts of nature, is not to reduce them to playthings for the poet's demented soul, but to preserve their external otherness. If there are hints that the poet is about to appropriate "things" to ease the sickness of her being, they are only muted, as in "Phenomenal Survivals of Death in Nantucket," where she says, "I see the water as extension of my mind,/ the troubled part."
From here on out, Glück could have taken any number of paths-or could she have?-perhaps going deeper into her mental resources to write a more urgent poetry. But by the time she gets to The Triumph of Achilles (Ecco Press, 1985), her interest in taking herself seriously as an important poet, steeped in mythological sources, becomes the defining thing about her. She now seems to write poetry for the sake of writing poetry; one wonders if the newfound plain language isn't a cover for thinness of ideas (if one looked hard enough under the poems in Firstborn, there was always a danger that the ideas might collapse, but then those early poems didn't invite rigorous scrutiny-the superficial verbal surprises sufficed). The regression from a cultured language to a more demotic one is typical of the other poets discussed here, suggesting a similar kind of devolution in the others as well; although the writers claim that a plain-spoken style was always their preferred mode, such was definitely not the case in their early work, when poetry qua poetry seemed to be taken seriously. As the individual self bloats up to displace the arena of tradition, the language becomes weaker and weaker, the poetry more ephemeral.
Between Firstborn and The Triumph of Achilles, there is a gap of seventeen years, broken only by the slim, unimpressive The House on Marshland (Ecco Press, 1975), a crisis of prolonged silence that suggests Glück's early impulse to write poetry was exhausted. In the intervening volume's "To Autumn," the poet looks back at "having/ flowered earlier" and "the long/ decaying days of autumn when I shall begin/ the great poems of my middle period." It would take seventeen years of effort for Glück to raise the finicky self to mythopoeic status. The poetic energy of the sixties, drawing on the exuberance of that decade, vanishes entirely. The new self that emerges is both inflatedly mythologized and unheroically quiet, at the same time.
In keeping with the dominant image of today's professional poet as drawn not irresistibly to her calling, but essentially a teacher lucky enough to write some, in between blocks, Glück describes herself, in Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (Ecco Press, 1994), as an insecure disciple grateful to have ended up as a poet. In her essay, "Education of the Poet," we get glimpses into the soul of the poet as having been formed by anorexia, analysis, and totemic father-figures, a psychoanalytical mess.
The Triumph of Achilles gives the impression of the poet having duly run out of steam, after the early imitative feminism inspired by Plath and other hard-edged poets of the late fifties and early sixties. The poet has settled into domesticity, and with any exigency gone, she is content, in "Summer," to be "artists again," with her husband, and to "resume the journey" toward happiness, that comes in the maturing phase of "deep isolation" of the "absence of regret." The inward turn of the seventies permeates this twisted gesture-although Glück might not appreciate this designation, gestures signifying too much activity-that consists of fake happiness following fake unhappiness, which nevertheless satisfies the poet on some deep level. Humorlessness is characteristic of the victim mentality; it's the tenor of protest literature that has replaced the bite of sixties rebellion; go no farther than "The End of the World" to be attacked by Glück's new humorlessness. In "Legend," the artificer of parables, seeking quick fixes in her Jewish identity, anticipates the onset of adult grief, and begins uttering the first of her platitudes: "to speak the truth/ which has been/ the salvation of our people/ since to speak the truth gives/ the illusion of Freedom."
The political overlay of the sixties gone, the poet as Sisyphus- "the life of art is a life/ of endless labor," she informs us in "The Mountain"-must now dig deep into her childhood, to discover false piercings of the sword: "there's no action, no development of character," she tells us in "A Novel," from Ararat (Ecco Press, 1990). She starts exploiting her sister to envelope us in a fog of nonexistent risk and danger (true to the false anxieties propagated by insecure intellectuals in the post-revolutionary decades following the sixties): "A child all alone/ can disappear, get lost, maybe forever," as Glück tells us in "Children Coming Home From School," and this is only a child to be met at the bus stop. There is nothing poetic about Glück's work here, as when she says, "My son and I, we're the living/ experts in silence," a sentiment a bureaucrat-expositor of family relationships might well have uttered.
If we compare "Labor Day" from Firstborn, to the poem of the same name in Ararat, we realize that all the verbal complexity, the tightness of meaning (even if on a less ambitious scale than Plath), the emotion, are all gone; Glück has accommodated herself to the intellectually flabby eighties. The impulse now is to present adults as perennially grief-stricken: in the new "Labor Day" (notice the privatization of the most class-informed holiday), the father has died, and the pet, emotionlessly, concludes that life on earth is "Not a sentence, but a breath, a caesura." The mythos of the grieving adult finds appropriate expression in a sort of irrational, pre-enlightenment, religious poetry, denying material necessity; do we ever hear what work the closed circle of Penelope and Odysseus and Telemachus do? The closed off family is the only realm of celestial music now.
The poet's persona is now of a woman leery of confession even as all she does is confess. Perhaps this reticence to accept the overflowing of preliteral emotion explains the recurrence of the small, unearned, nuggety payoff at poems' ends (the favorite Olds tic) that now leaks into Glück's work: "that's what you want, that's the object: in/ the end, the one who has nothing wins," as in "Widows," or "Because a wound to the heart/ is also a wound to the mind," in "The Untrustworthy Speaker," or "this, this, is the meaning of/ 'a fortunate life': it means/ to exist in the present," in "Lament," all from Ararat. Endless such profundities recur, until in the last phase of Glück's work, entire poems are strung together with such words of wisdom. A favorite motif of all the poets assayed here is the trivialization of death; again and again, we're told that death doesn't matter (a Plath carryover), or doesn't matter as much as death in life, caused by endless grief. In "Lullaby," Glück tells us, "The dying are like tops, like gyroscopes - | they spin so rapidly they seem to be still." All these subtle discountings of the finality of death - to what apolitical purpose are they geared?
Glück's tactic in The Wild Iris (Ecco Press, 1992) is to recall some of her verbal complexity from her earliest work, but to redeploy it toward an absolutely horizontal emotional scale. In the Zen-like calm prevailing in this collection, there is no excitement to the language: the poet as leader of her civilization is constructed as someone who accepts whatever happens, with equanimity. In "Love in Moonlight," the attitude about the soul is that it is "filled with fear that is moonlight really, taken/ from another source." Aiming for a Grahamian universal reconstitution of a plane (plain?) emotional field, including all known existing things stripped of their thingness, in poem after poem Glück tells us of paralysis after emotional death. The flowers given voice hint that the poet is aware of her stance: "why/ disdain the expansive/ field," in "Field Flowers," and "The great thing/ is not having/ a mind," in "The Red Poppy."
Evoking another recurrent motif of the poets considered here, their identification with machinery, "Daisies," more of Glück's creations, tell on the poet, who thinks that "Machines/ are the real world." And in yet another parallel with the other poets here, trivial, causeless uncertainty-not epistemological dread, or existential anxiety-pervades the mood in "The Silver Lily."
Meadowlands (Ecco Press, 1996) is Glück's insertion of the Odysseus myth in the sad-making machine that is her family. The result of this academic exercise is to reduce the significance of the original myth, with such banal assertions as: "Nothing/ is always the answer; the answer/ depends on the story," in "Moonless Night." Odysseus-Glück's husband-appears as insensitive Neanderthal male shrew, right out of a demented seventies sitcom. Telemachus-Glück's son-is the naïf who rings false at every step; his confessions are aimed to butter up his mother's grief. Penelope-Glück herself-is her own best counselor: the couple encounters emergencies "to test/ love and to demand/ fresh articulation of its complex terms," in "Parable of the Swans" (Glück engineers an awful lot of parables in her late phase). When PenelopeGlück says that "it came to light that the male and female/ flew under different banners," we think of contemporary male-female difference splitters like Deborah Tannen, John Gray, or Carol Gilligan. One of these pop counselors might well have declared, "Trust me: no one's going to be hurt again," as in "Heart's Desire."
All of Vita Nova (Ecco Press, 1999)-the post-divorce reflection-s a string of banalities, for which Glück is a glutton. Reflecting so much of contemporary American literature, in "Aubade" Glück talks about a "grief l thought I couldn't survive." In the post-feminist phase, Glück admits to her "two desires: desire/ to be safe and desire to feel." Her poetry now becomes abstract, image-free, spineless, like Graham's. Consider this stanza, in "Roman Study":
And then it occurred to him to examine these responses
in which, finally, he recognized
a new species of thought entirely, more worldly, more ambitious
and politic, in what we now call
human terms.
"The New Life," also strongly evocative of Graham's pointlessness, leads us on a wild-goose chase. In the poems in Vita Nova, names and places function as codes, without context. Glück strives desperately for wisdom, only to utter such banalities as: "I thrived. I lived/ not completely alone, alone/ but not completely, strangers/ surging around me," in "Formaggio," or "also the courage I will have acquired by then/ to meet my suffering alone/ but with heightened fortitude," in "Evening Prayers." "Timor Mortis," "Lute Song," "Earthly Love," and others consist of unremarkable statement after statement, held together without images, concluding only as in "Lute Song" that the "wish to survive" must be tuned into. Oprah herself wouldn't be displeased with this pulling-together after the divorce in "Descent to the Valley":
How sweet my life now
in its descent to the valley,
the valley itself not mist-covered but fertile and tranquil.
So that for the first time I find myself
able to look ahead, able to look at the world, even to move toward it.
Or "deep serenity flooded through me,/ such as you feel when the world can't touch you," in "Condo." The poet is healed. The imperative seems to be that the alternative to reason is blind hope, and the solution is to appreciate "Abstraction," in a poem called "The Winged Horse," that might well be an ode to Graham: "Come, Abstraction,/ by Will out of Demonic Ambition:/ carry me lightly into the regions of the immortal." Glück is "weary" of her "other mount,/ . . . Instinct out of Reality," and calls on Abstraction to take her "far from here, to the void, the star pasture"-or shall we say unified field? The attitude evoked in the pre-divorce, divorce, and post-divorce collections is one we know from contemporary spoiled celebrities, who create a big fuss of their various misfortunes, making virtues out of emotional addictions. Glück faithfully follows in her art the trajectory of her own life, as it dictates her moods and rhythms and choices; never is there a hint that there could be an artistic life free of real-world emotional pressures. There is no sign of an aesthetic filter, only endless self-counseling. We suspect-like with those attention-grubbing celebrities-that there is a kind of pleasure in elevating mild suffering to the summum bonum of human existence. .
Having done with husband and children, Glück returns to the theme of childhood in her last collection, The Seven Ages (Ecco Press, 2001). She is sounding more and more like Graham, Glück's poetry by now abstract to the point that a single typical poem, "Civilization," can contain as many abstract words as "perception of beauty," "desire for knowledge," "obsession," "human passion," "conceded," "offended," "enslavement," "isolated," "without pattern," "summoned," "resurrected," "communicate," "substance," "magnitude," "serene," "glorious," "chaos," "relationship," "apprehended," "mastered," and many more. Self-presentation as machine is in full thrust in "The Sensual World," a Grahamian refutation of the reality of objects, things, the material world, where we get the idea that Glück has finally run out of "things" to talk about. As we will see Levine doing, in "Mother and Child" Glück tells us that "Some machine made us; machine of the world," or "Machine of the family," or "Machine of the mother." Infantilization-along with mechanization-proceeds to the point where "veiled," dark genetic cells now become "pivotal," the master document. Poems like "Birthday" are unreadable compendiums of abstract unpoetic statements such as:
I remember that age. Riddled with self-doubt, self-loathing,
and at the same time suffused
with contempt for the communal, the ordinary; forever
consigned to solitude, the bleak solace of perception, to a future
completely dominated by the tragic, with no use for the immense will
but to fend it off-
Or this in "The Empty Glass":
Well, it all makes for interesting conjecture.
And it occurs to me that what is crucial is to believe
in effort, to believe some good will come of simply trying,
a good completely untainted by the corrupt initiating impulse
to persuade or seduce-
She seems to claim this, in "From a Journal," to be an entirely new form that she has invented, when in fact her powers have vaporized. The ideas now ascribed to children, her sister particularly, do not seem to belong to children; rather, they are of censoring parents. Her actual manifesto now, as in "Rain in Summer," might well be: "It was all going on much too long:/ childhood, summer. But we were safe;/ we lived in a closed form." Rejecting the sensual world of things, rejecting all reality, finally there is safety in "fixed conditions." The shrewish husband is gone even, and in stasis is nirvana. At least, Glück knows, in "Ripe Peach," the "terror of the physical world" forcing her contemporaries to return to intellectual childhood. The adult sentiments of the reading public are pushed aside by the poet's pathetic weakness, her fear of death. Finally, virtue can be made out of weakness, as in "Summer Night":
And the art always in some danger of growing repetitious.
Why not? Why not? Why should my poems not imitate my life?
Whose lesson is not the apotheosis but the pattern, whose meaning
is not in the gesture but in the inertia, the reverie.
The poet, in reality, is apprentice to no intellectual tradition, but to the exhausted subject of her own once half-alive emotions.
5.
Philip Levine, with a professed working-class background and disattachment to academia, unlike the female poets discussed here, has a different problem. Unlike Olds, Graham, and Glück, poets of maximized mediocre talent, Levine's undeniable metaphysical wit and well-honed capability to subsume the serious in the folds of the apparently banal, are evident in a handful of poems like "Animals Are Passing From Our Lives" or "M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfree Intermediate School." But it is difficult to be Whitmanesque in ambition and scope when you are constrained to limit your argument to the sensible and pragmatic, rather than be boundlessly optimistic like the master.
What has made Levine, a poet of such promising initial talent, become a showcase today for his own self-imitative mannerisms (a problem he seems aware of, guarding against it preemptively, as if to immunize himself from the inevitable criticism)? How do we explain the transition from a poet dealing, even if enigmatically and purposelessly, with the inanimate world around him in his early work, to a poet who in his late years has become a voice-over of the confessional mode so serene that the reader comes to the offering burnt with self-envy at his own vaster capacity for lament? Why was the balance between the outer and the inner directed voice so short-lived, a brief :flare-up of Levine's middle years, at which time he wrote perhaps from the least conscious stance possible for him? How does, in short, a man sprouting into a giant become a pygmy, comfortable among other pygmies? What happened to the fiendish imagination?
On the Edge (The Stone Wall Press, 1963), Not This Pig (Wesleyan University Press, 1968), and Red Dust (Kayak, 1971) are the early efforts where there is little of the confessional Levine to be seen. Here, Levine comes close to overcoming the limitations imposed by establishment culture on the working person's perceptual apparatus. Levine begins by being attuned to a panning emotional circumference of relationships and exchanges, between the animate and inanimate worlds. His early self-declared political anarchism is evident in his not taking the recondite self too seriously; he's after a state of mind beyond the daily ups-and-downs of work, family, politics. But as he tries on stylistic variation, struggles to reach for profundity, we can already detect (retrospectively, at least) that this poet's métier is soon to be compromised in the cultural environment within which he functions, that he will soon be called upon to reach beyond himself or delve deeper. And he falls right into the trap, trying the first route first, beginning with Pili's Wall (Unicorn Press, 1971), the worse They Feed They Lion (Atheneum, 1972), and the disastrous tum in 1933 (Atheneum, 1974), which marks the first stage of cannibalism of his private life, lasting him indefinitely.
The disturbing knowledge is that Levine, while capable of the early occasional gem, is actually more comfortable (perhaps too comfortable) when he adopts his almost unvarying style and tone, beginning with One for the Rose (Atheneum, 1981) and extending through Sweet Will (Atheneum, 1985), A Walk With Tom Jefferson (Knopf, 1988), What Work Is (Knopf, 1991), The Simple Truth (Knopf, 1994), Mercy (Knopf, 1999), and Breath (Knopf, 2004). Here the poet has settled into making a revelation of non-revelatory moments, shunning his youthful anarchism, what used to be his sheer pleasure in trying to make whatever he could of correspondences between apparently arbitrarily related perceptual machines. The exuberant language of They Feed They Lion's "Salami" and the title poem itself are less suited over the long haul to Levine's resigning sensibility than the setting-in of the plain style, in "New Season," from The Names of the Lost (Atheneum, 1976). In late middle and old age, Levine the progressive conforms to the right-wing principle of each according to his station and place (the bottom-feeder worker grateful to be allowed to live, the urban and suburban upper-middle-class person sniggering with self-satisfaction at the worker's attempts to achieve contentment with his dead-end lot). After his ruinous flirtation with overt sympathy for fighters in the Spanish civil war or the American civil rights movement-in such over-sentimentalized poems as "To P.L., 1916-1937," "They Feed They Lion," or "On the Murder of Lieutenant Jose del Castillo by the Falangist Bravo Martinez, July 12, 1936"-Levine seems to resign himself to the Reagan-Bush era return to medieval attitudes toward destiny and mobility.
The movement back and forth between tendencies, really flirtations with shifting philosophical outlooks, is given up entirely, in favor of settled, undisputed harmonics, where the working man is essentialist working man; and surely, no other proposition was going to be environmentally acceptable during the conservative relapse, which lasts till today, intensifies. The more that practical political options-including verbal playfulness with anarchism-seem to be circumscribed for real people, the more determinedly poets must make mythopoeical constructs out of what little material there can be found when one's being doesn't undergo evolution of any kind: hence the uncomplaining Detroit motor worker, the transmission fall guy, the assembly line poet who takes the blows as they come, a sight to warm the heart of any Republican country clubber. Levine, certainly, has moved with the times: this explains the entrapment he has imposed on himself, in an art that seems to evolve from, but is actually a refutation of, his early aesthetic. At the same time, we are glad that he has given up the struggle to experiment with styles and voices, having settled into the changeless persona of Levine the daunted working-class poet, this predictability being the most comforting aspect of reading him now.
The humor of an early poem like "To a Child Trapped in a Barbershop," from Not This Pig, which contains not a helpless stoicism but a hidden challenge to the deities in its address to the restless child, becomes transmuted over time into a humorless plea for the poet to be heard by the powers-that-be, to take account of his selfless death, wherever and everywhere. Compare also Levine's playful, genuinely self-questioning interviews in Don't Ask (The University of Michigan Press, 1981), an early compilation of conversations where he plays the amateur answering amateurs, to the poet basking in the settled myth of Levine in the more recent collection of interviews, So Ask (The University of Michigan Press, 2002). In "Hear Me" and "The Last Step," from Seven Years From Somewhere (Atheneum, 1979), the poet still has a direction to go in: a refusal to identify the worker as the sum of his work, of his waiting and longing. The urge to overexplain, make what should be implicit explicit, to reach almost toward bathos of self-whispering, becomes visible in "Lost and Found" in Ashes (Atheneum, 1980).
The conservative temperament since that turning point of the late seventies and early eighties-for Levine as for the country-has meant not leaving anything unsaid; it is where our culture feels most comfortable, in the territory of the said and sayable. Here Levine has foundered for a quarter-century, and here he feels compelled to indulge in the obsessive habit of negating all tentative affirmations-again to satisfy the uber-conservative cultural censors (of which there are plenty resident in each of us, once we beget the requisite amount of fame and accomplishment).
Thus, in One for the Rose (Atheneum, 1981), the poet is dressed up as a do-nothing, know-nothing schlemiel, perpetually wavering, uncertain, self-degrading and morose, of the Woody Allen or Jerry Seinfeld kind. The characteristic mode, as in "The Poem of Flight," is uncertain flight that aborts into abstract cancellation, at the first flap of the wing:
I suppose I must square my shoulders,
lean back, and say something else,
something false, something that even I
won't understand about why some of us
must soar or how we've advanced beyond
the birds or that not having wings
is an illusion that a man with my money
refuses to see. It is hard to face
the truth, this truth or any other,
that climbing exhausts me, and the more
I climb, the higher I get, the less I
want to go on, and the noise is terrible,
I thought the thing would come apart,
and finally there was nothing there.
"The Myth" now is of the poet as "stubborn, truculent, stupid," a jarring postmodern presence that seems somehow appropriately placed in the mythology of Levine's hardworking, gritty urban America. In the same collection, the reader is struck by the thought that Levine is determined to root out all beauty-by way of imagination, rather than abstract negation-from his future poetry. In "Get Up," the desperate, unearned attempt to elicit pathos on the poet's behalf is disappointing:
. . . If I
were serious I would say I
take my stand on the edge
of the future tense and offer
my life, but in fact I stand
before a smudged bathroom mirror
toothbrush in hand and smile
at the puffed face smiling
back out of habit.
In other poems in One for the Rose, such as "My Name," the poet in his middle period of fame can't seem to get beyond "a heaven of meaningless words." In "Roofs" the poet tells us that even as a child he recognized that the "clouds passing over./ were only clouds,/ not faces, animals, or portents." The poet is entering the zone of literalness that unexcitingly marvels at the mundane, accepting only the trivial as subject matter. In "I Wanted You to Know," we pick up hints of Levine struggling to imbue the trivial facts of his childhood and early adulthood with false significance, a project he will pull off to complete success in later work. "Never Before" is the anti-poem, of negation following negation, evoking more pathos toward the poet. "The Conductor of Nothing"-here meaning the train, but it could just as well refer to the poet himself-is Levine's exclusive persona from here on out.
In "One for the Rose," each of his mistaken turns early on smells to him now "like an overblown rose,/ yellow, American, beautiful, and true," making us yearn in the last line for negations of all the terms, for they are not overblown roses but underfed ones. "The Radio" contains an aesthetic that borrows from censored movies and books, Levine's manly code providing for a reticence that precludes him from writing about sex, matters of the flesh. The suggestion that nothing ever actually happens or is ever actually recorded makes us almost yearn for Olds's specificity of nipple and cunt. In "Depot Bay," Levine comes off as Olds minus sex, flab unrescued by the sensationalism of sex. But like Olds and Graham, he is not beyond randomly appropriating the borrowed pathos of the Holocaust, as in "To Cipriana, in the Wind," to try to draw us into his unexciting negations. "Rain Downriver" makes us think that Eliot's aesthetic of wavering paralysis came out of an age sick to death of authentic heroism, whereas Levine's comes out of an age already steeped in anti-heroism, so that the battling non-heroisms create a really flat effect. Eliot, when his narrators spoke of their own absurdity, made us think of the heroic unabsurd in the collective miasma; Levine is on his own with his professed ridiculousness.
Levine comes close to Olds-like strains of unconstraint in the continuingly transitional Sweet Will (Atheneum, 1985), particularly in "A Poem With No Ending," which makes us crave for an ending, in "Late Night," where place-names hide place-negations, and in "Last Words," which promises that survivalism is the last resort of an exhausted aesthetic. The succeeding collection, A Walk With Tom Jefferson (Knopf, 1988), has brief moments of genuine wit, as in "The Whole Soul," "For the Country," "I Sing the Body Electric," and the title poem, perhaps a last breath of life, before Levine assumes, in What Work Is (Knopf, 1991), the fixed character of the anti-bardic poet set on denying every last trace of heroism to gestures that give the appearance of heroism: the myth of rugged individualism of an earlier America, where mobility might conceivably lead to success, where a man might reinvent himself over and over, where risks might sometimes pay off in blustering successes, and where even the opposite sex might be charmed, is to be banished. This is Levine domesticated-the ideas in the American founding documents, the legendary apparatus of the pursuit of happiness that has until now sustained us, purged and expunged-so that the men only seek escape in fruitless meditation away from showy women.
The poet is aware at some level of the falseness of positing an innocent America before "prime-time TV," as in "Coming of Age in Michigan," but this seems to be part of his job, and he is compulsively drawn toward it. The younger Levine spoke in his prose of the lies of America's founding myths, while his poetry spoke in part against the reality; the older Levine has bought into a new myth-of unheroic, negating paralysis-that is altogether removed from the founding myths. The latter condition is probably worse.
The "simple truth," in the collection by that name, is the final stage of domestication, where other men, foolish and deluded, act out the American Dream on the poet's behalf, while the poet participates in the conservative political culture's construction of the artist as oddity, a mimic-man at best, with not enough independent soul in "Soul" to constitute a sufficiently stable narrative even to last him the day. In "The Trade," mundane events are glorified, raised to the level of transcendence, before the stage of mockery. In "Out By Dark," the mythopoeic infusion, without context, without urgency, is another reflection of the need to crush any signs of romanticism, so that the weakened man may find some place in the new economy, without ever complaining.
"Getting There" is the summation of Levine's present enervated aesthetic. Here, our anti-Kerouacian wanderer is beaten down by his six-year-old son's demand to be fed. Every last bit of romanticism is brushed out of the glorious Western landscape by causeless urban disaffection. On the road here, there is no companionship, no male bonding, no risk-taking. Every hint of whatever used to constitute the myth of American freedom is denied, destroyed, in the persona of the city boy who never complains, works without stint (does work make free?). The working-class male's obsessions-the brother-in-law Joseph, in "Blue," with his talk "all day and all night of beer/ and pussy"-are no match for comforting domesticity. Contrary to the celebration of his empathy toward the working class, Levine's new conservative sneer toward his origins is evident in "Blue and Blue," where the sustaining myth of upward mobility is denigrated, even desecrated, as he does also in "The Spanish Lesson."
This anti-Whitman now offers us the impossibility of communication across class or other divides in "Dust and Memory," the founding legend having been reduced to debris. Levine begins "The Escape" by stating, "To come to life in Detroit is to be manufactured/ without the power of speech." His vaunted memorialization of place is actually only to use the wasteland of the place as convenient code or symbol. Reminding us of Olds, in "The Escape," we proceed through various stages of infantilization (is this better than mechanization?) of the self, as the poet becomes at twenty-six a "woman" after first making love, having until then been a child, and as escape for the harried urban man becomes an impossibility. The myth-"I'm an American,/ even before I was fourteen, I knew I would have/ to create myself"-is quickly shattered in the narration of the destruction of the adventurous man. Demagogues all utter simple, indisputable truths, guised in the cover of plain speech; Levine's new man, denatured and deromanticized, occasionally even achieves momentary peace, as he voyeuristically watches his sister in "Listen Carefully" (echoes of Olds), the pretense of unfiltered memoir hiding his discomfort with ordinary work, and as also in "My Father With Cigarette Twelve Years Before the Nazis Could Break His Heart."
Mercy (Knopf, 1999) gives the impression that Levine is scraping the bottom of his barrel of memories (if memories are indeed what they are, and not fantasies) as he brings up an aunt or uncle, a fellow worker or departed soldier, to offer yet again the same persistent whine about the grief-proneness of all human exchange. The memories being thinner, the poems are pro forma, the characters having assumed roles Levine expects them to play. Levine doesn't even seem to have enough energy left for his previous shadow-dancing around doubt and certitude. There will be no deviation in his form and content. Not this poet. Breath (Knopf, 2004) is his slightest performance to date. "The Esquire" is a story without purpose, concluding with his typical grief-washed pale epiphany: "None of that matters now. The sun rose on time/ over the great parking lots, empty now/ that we're all too old or too dead to work." In "Dust" he takes a stab at realistic humor, but his heart isn't in it. It is characteristic that just when he is most out of breath, he should present this late effort as a collection of sacralized breath.
6.
Billy Collins is an example of a healthy counterpoint to many of the negative tendencies defining these poets. Trusting a childlike imagination in the true romantic sense, Collins's poetry is free of the entanglement with the whining, complaining, glorifying self typical of successful American poets these days (but it doesn't leave out the important unsaid either). Collins invites us to engage in exercise after exercise of metaphysical reconceptualization, refreshing ordinary experience, infecting it with a mystical glow to the extent he is capable. He doesn't ever seem to have written about his trivial experiences as a child, a spouse, or parent; his field of observation is broad and expansive, and doesn't subjugate the natural realm to selfish human expropriation. Nor does he seem terribly insecure about the big, bad world out there. When he talks about death, he means it. When he brings history into the equation, it's not as a sideshow to his own banal preoccupations. He doesn't pontificate, he is not yet a seer anointed by the writing program circuit, and his humor makes an overweening counseling impulse inconceivable. Apparently not beholden to some programmatic myth of Collins, constructed by his slavish fans, he seems free to evolve as he sees fit. Celebrity wears easy on him.
And yet-despite the generally sane direction Collins's poetry heads into, Collins seems to want to shun greatness. Collins is, after all, in a minority when it comes to the practice of literature, and the majority view perhaps influences each of us to a greater extent than we are conscious of. Yes, we can introduce the subject of death, and do so from the point of view of tragic inevitability, rather than a lament against it, as the narcissistic writers do, but we cannot challenge death, we cannot seek immortality, we cannot believe too strongly in our own genius. The times call for a contentment even when raising the tragic issue of death, a contentment that comes across when Collins seems to derive some pleasure from the sheer fact of having posed intellectual riddles. Collins is like a happy young adult solving the Sunday paper's crossword puzzle, being aware of the front-page headlines, the mayhem and chaos informing the human marauding of the planet, but who cannot let it spoil the back-page order. For there is immense stability in devising imaginative apparatuses, machine-like in their intensity and single-mindedness, with little of true unpredictability. Collins, as admirable as his departure from the pathetic navel-gazing of the more critically acclaimed writers might be, is as averse to risk-taking in some ways as they are.
In The Apple That Astonished Trees (University of Arkansas Press, 1988), Collins offers many satisfying examples of his signature move: begin with a trope or event or reality we take for granted, subject it to imaginative exploration by altering one or more of the initial variables, and see where that takes him. Usually, we end up at a satisfactory place, where we've realized the arbitrary nature of the setup conditions, the force field our minds operate within. There's a sense of liberation that follows from performing these mental gymnastics, leaping far higher in the pole vault than we deemed possible-but we land nonetheless, if a little too well cushioned by the landing pad. Notice also what Collins doesn't attempt-his exercises are usually aimed at small scenes, or if they deal with big subjects like Death, they deal with small conceptualizations of them. Unlike the other poets discussed here, for whom contingency seems to be non-existent, and who seem to find themselves in perpetual straitjackets of circumstance and destiny, Collins is a genuine humanist, with the old-fashioned understanding of it that informs the best of the enlightenment. But in the end he is a cultivator of the garden, not a world-wanderer.
The Apple That Astonished Trees and Questions About Angels (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991) are exemplary collections of Collins's tricky fantasies: In "Questions About Angels," we are asked what else we should know about the lives of angels besides how many "can dance on the head of a pin." Other poems ask: What would it be like to walk across the Atlantic? What feelings might a troubadour have experienced? If the members of a creative writing class were to come back as citizens in a city, what roles would they play?
A first reaction to these exercises might be that Collins's characteristic operation-an initial ingenious leap, followed by a long train of hypotheses, speculations, wonderments-is poetry-candy, that although he has departed from the self's nervous tics, he hasn't replaced this with anything more serious than cute intellectual puzzles. Is Collins, after all, a one-trick pony, dealing only with harmless stuff, altering values where the changes don't affect the fundamentals of human life? In the poems from Picnic, Lighting (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) and Questions About Angels not chosen for inclusion in Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House, 2001), the poet slides perhaps too much into the role of jester. The seriousness that an Auden might bright to this sort of enterprise is missing. But only to have this reaction would be to underestimate Collins's first cautious steps toward reinvigorating American poetry.
Implied in all his poetry, and often made explicit, is a serious investigation of what constitutes the art of poetry. It's revealing that the other poets talked about here don't spend any time wondering about their own art; part of the trick is to make us think that the poetry they are producing is somehow timeless, eternal, not subject to the randomness of the author's circumstances prodding it. This other poetry comes at us as in a deluge, from which the sturdiest shelter-let alone a meager umbrella-can't protect us. But a poet like Collins follows his great intellectual forebears by giving us a chance to make up our own minds: Do we want to get wet, or do we step inside the doorway? The dominant tendency in American poetry is a pervasive anti-humanism; the human being, and the real world he interacts with, have been removed from the operation of the will. All one can do, if one were to go by Olds and Levine, is to take things as they come. A first step toward questioning this primitive-almost barbaric-attitude might be to get away from the poet as peddler of soft lies, lies invented to lull us into an even deeper sleep than we are in. Collins does that well in "The History Teacher," from Questions About Angels, where the suggestion is that he is not interested in sprucing up history to cater to our short attention span.
There is a connection between Collins's deep attachment to objects, the sensual constituents of reality, the thingness of things, and his constant questioning of the art of poetry, its very purpose (the question of purpose is never taken up seriously by our lauded poets). A claim made for much contemporary American poetry is that it lavishes attention to details: but the details upon inspection often tum out to be shortcuts, appendages to the author's bulging self, code words and synonyms, not objects appreciated for what they are. Collins's elegy, "The Death of Allegory," from Questions About Angels, makes it clear that oblivion-practiced selflessness lies in the observation of things as they are, not as we wish them to be. Interestingly, this result follows from his playfulness with the materiality of objects, just as his lack of moralizing, sermonizing, whining, and complaining follow from his ability to pose the question: Who is the audience of his poetry? And is it even there? What if words sink into the void? None of the other poets studied here seems to be bothered by this prime question for a serious artist; they take their audience (fan base?) for granted, never worry about it. The claim is also often heard that the better-known American poetry does not moralize; but in fact these are old-time preachers barking from the pulpits, forcing us to accept their creed (which amounts to not much more than their insatiable need), or be excluded from the company of educated people.
Collins will have none of that. In an ironic early manifesto poem, "Purity," from Questions About Angels, Collins tell us that "what I write will be pure,/ completely rinsed of the carnal,/ uncontaminated by the preoccupations of the body." But the organs of the body, which Collins wants to strip one by one, writing as a skeleton, are inescapable. What, then, is Collins interested in purging his writing body, or skeletal form, of? Poems that are only about "exploiting the connection between sex and death," or only "about death," in a way that perverts the classical tradition. In the next poem, "Nostalgia," a characteristic Collins attitude is on display, the idea that nostalgia has become such a pervasive modem trait that it extends not only to eons past but to events hours or minutes ago. Having this ironic attitude toward nostalgia frees Collins from the burden imposed by memory that debilitates our other poets.
The Art of Drowning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), in many ways a transitional volume, engages the reader with Collins's always refreshing approach toward his claimed literary predecessors-Penn Warren, Moore, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Cervantes-who appear as correspondences to things in the natural world, often mice, or other animals. Notice how infrequently, if ever, influences are mentioned by the reigning American poets, another tactic that frees them to moralize in a free-associating manner. "Reading in a Hammock" reminds us that the typical American poet almost never writes about the act of reading either, let alone writing. By this stage in Collins's career, we are convinced that he will forever maintain his Romantic, childlike perception of the world, like a Keats or Shelley, as his way of effecting a small rebellion in aesthetics.
Collins makes it clear that there are no fixed parables to revert to, no narratives of the mechanism of modem life that we must pledge allegiance to. "The City of Tomorrow," the glossy mechanized version of it in favor in the thirties, forties, and fifties, is not something "we would come to inhabit/ but a place that inhabits us"-in that case, we are at liberty not to inhabit it, should we choose so. Indeed, Collins envisions a city of the future full of natural objects, returning us to our true origins. And whereas the others, particularly contemplating fiftieth birthdays, want to return unblemished to childhood, the occasion of Collins's "Fiftieth Birthday Eve" doesn't interrupt his empathetic connection with things. In another manifesto poem, "Workshop," he points out, in the guise of a student whose work he is supposedly evaluating, his own strengths and weaknesses as a poet: what saves him in the end is the "voice of the mouse" busy collecting things while the "people in the house" are "fast asleep."
Whereas the other poets tend to talk about a singular house (of the childhood, also containing the threatening marital bed), Collins speaks in terms of multiple rooms (inhabited even at night, unlike in the work of Glück, et al., where the house is uninhabited without the primary owner) which it's possible to move back and forth to as one acquires more knowledge of things and of people. The fluidity of perception leads to useful payoffs at the end of poems, such as in "The First Dream," where the romantic merges into the rationalist, unlike the obligatory little tags attached to poems to justify their existence that we often see today; what Collins calls in "Lines Lost Among Trees" from Picnic, Lightning: "the little insight at the end/ wagging like the short tail/ of a perfectly obedient spaniel/ sitting by the door." A poem like "Man in Space" is infinitely superior to pointless domestic laments (Collins is in this sense one of the few poets writing in the mode of silence today, although there are a few others too, like Li-Young Lee), and "Philosophy" a valuable substitute for the false anxiety, worry, and insecurity informing our domesticated and academicized poets. The only mode available to the poets of the day seems to be a hardboiled naturalism, a socialist realism for today that is the antithesis of organic development of the human body and spirit; responding to this, Collins, in "The End of the World," magnifies (and diminishes) the free-floating fear of apocalypse by suggesting that the end of the world, in "smaller endings," occurs all day, all the time. Does this not make nostalgia for trivia an academic accessory? Shunning immersion in such ephemera as the culminating points for other poets), Collins concludes, in "Some Final Words":
the past is nothing,
a nonmemory, a phantom,
a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss
is composing another waltz no one can hear.It is a fabrication, best forgotten,
a wellspring of sorrow
that waters a field of bigger vegetation.Leave it behind.
Present-orientedness was the dominant mode of the founders of the enlightenment; Collins has this tendency in oodles. This goes along with repeated moments of subtle beauty in Collins's work, whereas his compatriots seem to delight in digging around in the muck, the uglier, the dirtier, the better: this works for them as commitment to realism. In "Picnic, Lightning," Collins's clown's-I-view of the world encompasses an attitude toward death that doesn't demean or trivialize it, as is so often the case with the other poets, but accepts its arbitrariness and prematurity (no matter when it arrives) while recognizing that the bigger issue is slow death, which occurs every moment (the clowns, we know, are capable of infinitely more sadness than those who parade as melancholies). Unlike the uncontrolled verbosity of a Graham, Collins shows a sense of proportion in all of his work, writing not one word more or less than required by the poem, as in "Shoveling Snow with Buddha." In a poem like "Snow," Collins teaches us that all things come in pairs (even if the alliances keep shifting), that all things have their match in other things, and yet that there are no necessary, inevitable correspondences. "Japan" typifies another characteristic Collins attitude: reality differs based on location (this has its own freeing possibilities). In "The Butterfly Effect," Collins dares to enter the butterfly, rather than the human world affected by its random motions.
The shunning of relativism is a marker of art produced in the very late postmodern era, a result that is somehow connected with the puritan unease with sensuality. Childhood is childhood only from the position of childhood, in and of that moment, not following it, not the prequel to all sequels, a basic idea that seems to elude most American poets. All things are always in instant decline, even in the moment they are occurring. There is no Golden Age, as Collins shows in "Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles from Tintern Abbey," whereas the literalist, fundamentalist reading of time past in the leading poets of the age seeks to duplicate the Golden Age. When dealing with the fate of narrative, in "Aristotle" Collins is confident enough in his art to be both playful toward traditional form while being reverent of it. His constant self-deprecation is genuine, romantic, nonmechanistic, and in "The Flight of the Reader" he understands why we are prone to loving writers like him:
Is it because I do not pester you
with the invisible gnats of meaning,
never release the whippets of anxiety from their crates,
or hold up my monstrous mirror,
a thing the size of a playing field?
The lament often heard is that readers of serious literature are disappearing. Collins knows that the reader can suddenly disappear, whereas Glück and company count on his eternal loud presence. In his latest collection, Nine Horses (Random House, 2002), as Collins opens with a prologue called "Night Letter to the Reader," there is a danger that he might be catering too much to the actual reader out there, instead of the reader of his imagination. The risk, within the literary environment Collins operates in, is whether he will now lose his sharp sting, the ability to write parables that end in flux, the strength that comes from knowing his weaknesses. But we can be hopeful because for Collins the celestial music seems to remain in the natural world, not within the house, as for Glück. In "Aimless Love," Collins continues with his individualist outlook, although constrained by America's changed reality. He's still in love with objects as they are as much as ever, still making seamless transitions from mice to people, still relating honestly to the world of things.
We notice in the new poems an advance in seriousness; the old trick of following an imaginative scenario leads now to more unpredictable results. The progression for Collins is from insomnia to writing, rather than from childhood to marriage and divorce and back again to childhood, as for the other poets. In "Balsa," childhood is, for Collins, "that small vessel of wonder and cruelty," an attitude which contrasts with the cloying nostalgia for childhood shown by the typical American poet. In "Royal Aristocrat" and "Paris," Collins makes important further moves toward genuine self-deprecation, which is to say, honesty. His imagery in "Istanbul" is suffused with a relish for life-"I felt myself filling with gratitude/ the way a cloud fills with rain,/ the way a glass pipe slowly fills with smoke"-in a way that the others, weighed down by self-conscious whining, their egos incapable of being satisfied, don't seem capable of. We like Collins because he is always aware of the contingency of all things, rather than expecting the world to be nice to him, like children do, and because he isn't like poets who offer false nuggets of insight, satisfying readers in the way Dr. Phil or Laura might gratify the members of the audience who must have their thoughts thought out for them.
Because Collins is one among a rare breed of grown-up writers in a world of babies, when he uses the word "survivors" in "Obituaries," he defuses the word of false emotion, of the baggage of meaning carried around from place to place by other poets. For Collins (as for his great modernist predecessors) it's objects that escape, that defy categorization-". . . an admirer such as myself,/ a devotee of things-/ their biggest fan, you might say," as he claims in "Albany"-while for the weak-willed poets writing today, it's people who escape. He truly admires the "roadside flower" in "Albany," whereas for Glück, it's only the flowers in the confines of her garden that mean anything. In their futile pursuit of people, the other poets dehumanize-"how the woman's heart/ could have broken/ by being demoted from mother/ to mere arrangement, a composition without color," as Collins wonders in "Study in Orange and White"-whereas we want to stay with this imaginative poet, wondering where he will go next.
The humanist challenge is to use imagination to reorder the world, rather than accept the fate of man living without freedom, buffeted by a perilous fate; in "Litany," this uncompromising attitude is on full display, even as Collins retains his reverence for tradition. Collins, the comic poet, always expects tragedy; whereas the others always expect comic endings, thereby becoming overbearing. At the rhetorical level, Collins in "To My Patron" and elsewhere rejects domesticity, while the others yearn for nothing more than it. In "Writing in the Afterlife," writing turns out to be consignment to hell, not heaven, overturning all our quaint notions about the writing life, letting us see in the rhythm of the poem that all ideas are conditional, because constructed from imagination; his opposites on the writing benches write as if their lives were reality written big, utterly unchangeable, utterly fated.
There is no better summation of Collins's life work than the concluding poem in Nine Horses, "Poetry," where he describes poetry as "a field where the animals/ who were forgotten by the Ark/ come to graze under the evening clouds," as opposed to today's naturalists, who try to "set up/ the three-legged easel of realism/ or make a reader climb/ over the many fences of a plot." As for the cranked-up details realist poets offer up, "Poetry is no place for that." Poets are "busy doing nothing" and there may not even be the need to watch somebody crossing a bridge for imagination to be fired up. The nothingness Collins talks about is the only valid negation around, not the clutter of nothings Graham and Levine throw around at every opportunity. The future will tell if Collins will succumb to the temptation of slipping into sentimentalism, as everything in this literary culture demands, and as hints are perhaps already apparent in "As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse" or "Tipping Point."
7.
The larger question, of course, is what stops a Collins from consistently and breathtakingly exceeding the expectations game? Why can he not declare full independence from the colonizing forces, and be done with it? And where are the many others like him? We see them here and there, writing quietly, not drawing attention to themselves, or to their genius. They are minor geniuses, even if they aren't at the top of the economic pyramid in the poetry profession, but they aren't enough to congeal into a critical mass. Is the idea of periodic revolution in poetry a passé notion, now that poetry doesn't emanate from outside the academic establishment, but is fully integrated within it? Whoever heard of professors taking to the barricades, to storm down the house of politeness? And what would we do if we had a genuinely revolutionary poet in our midst? Is it possible for a spirit to transcend the smallness of his compatriots, including ultimately his readers, if the distance between the two is too great?
Collins is not offered here by any means as the antidote to what ails American poetry; he is only one among many possible directions, each of which could bridge the gap between life as it is lived and the detached reworkings of trivia that pass for successful poetry today.
We can conceive, at least theoretically, of an Olds who stoically takes family relationships as a starting point, not the concluding act to a life spent pondering little imponderables; a Graham who is genuinely philosophically informed, so that instead of showing off what she half-knows, she makes philosophy, not necessarily poetry, better off with a precise engagement; a Glück who romantically admires the natural world, not to mention history and myth, instead of reducing everything outside her to her own small dimensions; a Levine who provokes existential crises in readers of all classes, his poetry coming from work as it is practiced today, not work as it is romanticized in some faraway nineteen-forties by the poetry establishment; and even a Collins who attempts an uncompromisingly humanistic cross-pollination between the individual and history, so that the individual again takes center stage as the maker of the will and the idea, ceding no ground to the lamentable forces around him.
The quality that has been lost in contemporary American poetry above all else is decorum, in the classical meaning of the word. Taste, decency, proportion, humor, good will, transcendence, balance, respect, all are out the door: whether it applies to the writer relating to his work, to his predecessors and compatriots, or to his reader. A shrill transparency of questionable motives is everywhere on display. The culture of indecorum overwhelms even the better, calmer voices. A Donald Hall, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, or W. S. Merwin-each with recognizable talent even if the talent has declined precipitously in each case toward the end-cannot now write a poem that can mean anything in this culture of ear-shattering rap, tattooed teflon skin, and scattershot trash-talking (for Olds is really one of the first full-blown Allen Iversons of the poetry world). In any event, the ambition of Hall et al. is to remain quiet in the comers, not to make a display of themselves, and that doesn't seem to work these days, unless one only has posterity in mind.
Originality is a lost value; one seeks it everywhere in vain. When one reads Charles Simic, it is with the full knowledge that he is enacting word squabbles within the old surrealist game, that he is playing his expected role as existentially doomed Eastern European politicized poet, for whom the nature of reality is slightly off-kilter, slightly bizarre. But there is no emotion drawing us into Simic's work. Besides, over time he has become gentler and gentler in language, as if pseudo-surrealism must also accommodate the reigning populist mode. Each of the poets studied here seems to have camp followers. Nearly every female poet writing today seems to correspond with Glück. Bob Hicok is a reflection of Collins. The imitations are usually worse than the model. We are caught in a vicious trap of language degenerating into paler and paler imitations of its latent power, so that, unfortunately, a strong case can actually be made for the unreal world the language poets live in. At least Brenda Hillman doesn't take her potty training so seriously as to never have arisen from her seat.
There is no extraordinarily synthesizing, assimilating, accommodating American poet writing today on the scale of the great minds of the past. One wonders about the agitated, controlling, berserk, but illuminating reactions of an Auden to the global conflagration after 9/11, a Yeats to the conquest of religious fundamentalism over normal politics, and an Eliot to the threat to civilization posed by the new breed of fascist leaders. Or on the positive side of the ledger, the promise of collective joy brought about by the hissing, breathing, expelling hedonism of a brave new world where an omnipresent technological competence, the abolition of physical and chemical mysteries, and the emergence of the first true world culture throw off the whole baggage of superstitious human history. Alas, our stooped, shrunken, disabled contemporary poets will never tell us either the highs or the lows of the new reality.
NB: A variant version of this essay was published in 2006 in the journal Cambridge Quarterly.
Banner graphic source: the etching (cropped) titled "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos", created by Francisco Goya between 1797 and 1799. In the public domain.
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