Review

Matthew Buckley Smith. Dirge for an Imaginary World. San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press, 2012. 80 pp. $16.95, paper.

After the decades of foofaraw, after the histrionic wailing and the gnashing of teeth, let us be honest. American poetry is not, after all, dead. Yes, it contains a great deal of necrotic tissue in it, but a pulse persists. Our poetry remains vital not only in the work of our many distinguished elder statesmen, like Walcott and Wilbur, but also in the work of youngish and younger poets like Bill Coyle, Morri Creech, Stephen Kampa, Adam Kirsch, A.E. Stallings, Natasha Trethewey, Caki Wilkinson, and Greg Williamson. All of these poets are, at their best, astoundingly good, jaw-droppingly, heart-stoppingly good, and there are many more who are deserving of notice. And then, let us not forget that Claudia Emerson, Joseph Harrison, Mary Jo Salter, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Rosanna Warren, and Franz Wright, among others, are all, as of this writing, under sixty, and are all writing brilliantly. Yes, we live, after all, in an age of great bounty. In the midst of the riotous city, of the obstreperous hordes swarming the streets, the sumptuous banquet of good poetry has gone on, unperturbed, and we should be grateful.

Of course, for all the excellence, for all the wheat, there is a great deal more chaff, as is always the case, and, due to the proliferation of writing programs and journals, the evidence of that chaff is more apparent now than in ages past, is, in fact, to some degree institutionalized at this point. But the sins of bad writing are, more or less, the same as they ever were, and primary among them is the sin of pride, which is another name for certainty, which is another name for complacency. So many writers, who would mock the worst of the Victorians for thoughtlessly wrenching their every notion into blank verse, will themselves thoughtlessly allow their own notions to slouch into a free verse more accurately called “non-verse,” taking for granted that metrical poetry, or even more loosely formal poetry, is not the kind of thing one does anymore. Id est: bad poets are forever taking form for granted. As Pound said, “Meter must mean,” and that is true, whether one writes in a regular meter or in free verse. Indeed, the practitioners of non-verse are those who forget that, in Pound’s command to “Make it new,” the word, “it,” has an antecedent. Novelty is not the end of poetry.

But the best response to bad writing is silence, so let us shift our topic. Among the excellent youngish and younger poets of our time, one notices, in general, a tendency toward playfulness. This playfulness—a kind of tombstone-jumping irony in the manner Calvino ascribes to Cavalcanti—serves most often as a fake ID to allow great moral seriousness to sneak into the dance-club. It is an excellent technique, but one must acknowledge it is not the only technique. What our poetry has been missing for some time is a sterner voice, a severer vision, willing to risk being uncool, willing to risk the buffoonery of brooding in order to speak gravely of grave matters. Such a voice, such a vision does not forbid humor, but its humor is darker, heavier, bitterer than the lissome jokes and puns we more often encounter. Bill Coyle’s outstanding debut, The God of This World to His Prophet, moves in the direction of such a voice and such a vision, but we get the thing full-on in Matthew Buckley Smith’s debut collection, Dirge for an Imaginary World.

Smith’s book is stark. Its vision is, most often, severe in the manner of George Meredith’s masterpiece, Modern Love. Of course, there are also traces of Swift, of Baudelaire, of Housman, of Larkin. It is the kind of poetry written by a man of serious mind, refusing complacency, refusing the cuddly lies of comfort, and walking into the dark night’s storm, clear-eyed, in pursuit of the meaning of his existence. Carrie Jerrell, in her blurb, quite rightly notes the similarity between Smith’s poems and those of Thomas Hardy, as both poets trade in an austere and merciless beauty. Indeed, Smith is one of those rare poets, like Hardy, who can break your heart in all the ways you didn’t know you wanted it to be broken. Poem after poem says the things that we would say if we were more honest, and says those honest things the way we would say them if we were more artful. But, unlike Hardy, who could rely on a chilly pastoral mode to dramatize his characters’ inner suffering, Smith, being a poet of our own age, cannot turn to brumal heaths and beautifully drear landscapes but must, instead, show the heartbroken and lost of our own time as they are, wandering through city streets and suburban bars, lacking even the dignity of suffering picturesquely.

       Youth

       I miss believing that I’ll never die,
       Or is it that there won’t be a tomorrow?
       Both lines work out about the same: deny
       The day you’ll have to pay back what you borrow.
       It used to be I never went to bed
       A second night with any girl I found.
       No breakfast in those days—a smoke instead,
       Then out the door before she came around.
       Last night I passed a toppled garbage bin,
       Its liner sagging with a rat’s remains.
       He sank a little when I squinted in
       And seemed embarrassed by his greedy pains.
       And so much like a man, the way he sat
       Still in his death, and so much like a rat.

This is devastating poetry, devastating. Smith refuses to indulge in idealizing his past, refuses to be transported by the sweet incense of memory into a transcendent and deathless realm, though he “miss[es]” the ability to do so. The speaker recognizes the appeal of that vision, but he cannot allow himself to indulge in it, because that vision is a lie. Instead, the poem, which is the book’s first, opens by bluntly asserting the speaker’s idealism has passed, and by subtly asserting that this speaker is, in consequence, aware of his own mortality, of his confinement within the prison of Time. How many poets luxuriate in the plush sensuality of their pasts, never reaching the detachment or self-awareness Smith reaches in his first line! How many poets wrap themselves in their idealism like a Snuggy™! Not Smith: the sonnet suggests that the big fun of youth, the trysts and the self-destructive habits, the pursuit of lubricious escape worshiped by our culture, is akin to the rat feeding on filth.

Why is the rat in the dumpster dead? If we take the entire image of the rat as functionally metaphorical, we find the dumpster is the vehicle for Time, a grim enough vision, but we also find that the dead rat is the figure for the speaker, suggestive of the spiritual death accompanying such a hedonistic past. But the poem is not so easy. The simile of the couplet acknowledges the comparison’s failure: the speaker is not actually dead like the rat; rather, the speaker must go on living, having endured the death of idealism, the death of which disallows the certain correlation of one thing with another. Indeed, the simile must fail, as correspondences fail, if we are to believe Rimbaud’s revelations leading up to his famous Le musique savant manque à notre désir. Ah, the speaker cannot even accept the cold comfort of ultimate despair, which would come with accepting that he himself is adequately represented by the dead rat. This is honesty. This is the “little ease” described by Camus in The Fall, that device of torture in which one, being enclosed, can neither stand up straight nor sit entirely down, and in which one must forever contort one’s self into a different state of discomfort. The poem refuses idealism, and it refuses despair. The poem, at last, refuses certainty, because certainty is, for Smith, the great lie. In fact, we might say that certainty itself is the “imaginary world” of the book’s title. Poem after poem strips away the veneer of certainty and strives to see things as they are. Of course, such a seeing is, the book reminds us, impossible, and this impossibility is at the book’s thematic core.

But, whenever poetry’s involved, a discussion of theme must lead to a discussion of style. We might begin by saying that Dirge for an Imaginary World contains no free verse, that it contains a wide variety of forms, including sonnets; ballad stanzas; heroic couplets; sestets; rhymed quatrains in trimeter, tetrameter, and pentameter; poems in mixed meters; blank verse; Sapphics; hemistichs; et cetera. The variety of forms within the book, however, is not a sign of Smith’s formal mastery; what is a sign of Smith’s formal mastery is that each form means, that each poem’s form significantly interacts with its content. How? Most often, as the poem’s content strips away the lies of certainty, as the content rubbles the foundations of each imaginary world, the form, ironically, is building a new imaginary world, a new shape, a new myth, with the perfection of the form’s exactitudes corresponding to the perfection of the lie that is certainty. In short, Smith’s forms function by illustrating the subjective self’s inability to transcend itself or enter into things as they are, the inability of the I to be certain, even of uncertainty. If the book is a “dirge,” a formal work of music, it is a work of art, an imaginary world, lamenting the passing of another imaginary world, and Smith’s is the vision that refuses to forget it is a vision, that scrutinizes its seeing even as it sees, that mistrusts itself as much as it mistrusts the idealism it sees through.

For complacent readers, the appearance of traditional forms may signal some kind of old-fashioned stuffiness, a square-ness, a lack of familiarity with “what’s going on” in poetry. Nonsense. Smith’s poems do what good poems do with forms: they make their forms integral. If the poems are not faddish, or en vogue, it is only because good poetry is rarely faddish, or en vogue; it is always difficult, because it is always faithful to life, and the world, especially in our time, has little use for difficulty or fidelity, easy and promiscuous entertainments being constantly available. Happily, good readers have already recognized Smith’s achievements. Here is his “Nowhere,” which Kevin Young selected for the Best American Poetry 2011:

       Nowhere

               i.m. Steve Sigur

       The sprinkler system wakes up on the hour,
       Casting its vacant arcs across the lawn.
       All night its clockwork tends to every flower
       Bedded down here to bury roots and spawn,
       While nowhere in particular my friend,
       Who just last week lay mumbling on a cot,
       Is dead, is nothing time or work can mend,
       Though his machinery remains to rot
       As I walk late at night across a campus
       Hundreds of miles away, which is to say
       As near to him as anywhere, and tempus
       Fugit no less irreparabile
       From me than from the blossoms here and there
       Who do not know their lot, and do not care.

You’ll note this poem includes a glance at the famous passage from the Georgica of Vergil: Sed fugit interea fugit irreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore, or, “But it flees in the meanwhile; time flees irretrievably, while we wander in circles, captive in our love of the singular.” The realization, reached through this allusion, is brutal. For all our self-knowledge, we come to the same end as the “blossoms” and the people who don’t pursue knowledge and just don’t care. The noble Roman and the barbarian die the same death. This is a particularly brutal realization for writer-types, who want to think that we are better off for all our learning, for our reading Vergil, for our studying Latin, for our writing whatever it is we write. Perhaps we are, but Smith refuses to congratulate himself for reading poetry, or for writing poetry. The poem can’t settle for the certainty, so rampant in the poetry world, that everyone should read poetry, and should write poetry, and that poetry makes us better people, as if browsing a book of sonnets could wash us clean of sin. Is it really any solace to Vergil to know that a writer, 2000 years later, is quoting a fragment of a work few read, even fewer in its own language? Did it change his fate, spare his suffering, that he was the greatest poet of the world’s greatest empire? Probably not. Vergil, the man, is dead, though his gifts remain.

As for that, there is quite a bit in Dirge for an Imaginary World that has a chance to remain, if not in the political treatises so often being passed off as anthologies these days, at least in the hearts of its readers. Poems like “The Ascetic Speaks of Heaven,” “Meaning,” “A Lesson,” “A Pledge,” “Juglans Nigra,” “Late Aubade,” “At the Spring Ballet Exams,” and, my personal favorite, “Diary,” are nearly perfect, and one has no sooner read them than one seems, almost, to have memorized them. Smith’s poems, at their best, are rich in the complexity that rewards careful and repeated reading, but they are also pleasurable, available, at least in part, on the first read. They are poems of what Allen Tate called “knowledge carried to the heart,” poems written with the entirety of the human apparatus, and, while the poems’ distinctly grave vision and voice, coupled with their dexterous technique, may initially seem abrasive in their divergence from the more familiar and jubilant manner, they should earn Smith a place at the banquet with our best young poets, where, amid the brilliance and headiness, the need will arise, at the end of the night, for a sober, steady-handed poet to drive everyone home.

Will Schutt. Westerly. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. 80 pp. $18.00, paper.

This year’s Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize went to Will Schutt for Westerly, a collection of poems that meditate on travel and mortality, on being led and pushed to and from the West. Schutt engages memory and its fallibilities, the elegy and possibilities that must come with it. The speaker takes the reader on travels from a small town in Rhode Island, to Wisconsin, to the West Coast, and to Italy.

He sets the tone of the collection with the opening poem, “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” balancing the intellectual with pop culture, giving weight to the historical patter of Billy Joel as he invokes de Sade, foreshadowing loss amidst a pleasant summer scene. In “Rock Maple, White Pine,” he writes “Part of you is thinking this early / why ravel means entangle and disentangle // at the same time, as if the interrogative / mood were the only concept // hanging about to hold the hour still.” This is what Schutt gives us throughout the collection—poems that entangle and disentangle at the same time. He teasingly complicates and simplifies in the same sentences, kindly asking the reader to consider the speaker’s observations and declarations. In the unrhymed sonnet “A Kind of Poetry,” Schutt writes “Sometimes you turn to poetry / the way you turn to another country. / […] / You notice things you wouldn’t / otherwise. You notice things.” He then does exactly that in the elegantly translated mid-century Italian poems that make up the second section.

In “Crenellated Playroom,” his most heartbreaking poem and the longest in the collection, Schutt elegizes a dear friend who died young, whose “midlife crisis / peaked in prep school.” She is the embodiment of youth and maturity, living and elegy. In the poem, as her health fails, Laura’s personality is vibrant; she is those contradictions embodied. As Schutt writes, “—At her sickest, whittled down to brutal / humor only have-nots possess, grand dame / receiving guests in bed, Laura would say, / ‘That coat’s not really your color’ or ‘I hope / she’s not at my funeral.’” She is the juxtaposition of the serious intellectual and the democratic humorist.

In Westerly, Schutt takes up estrangement. It finds its way into poems about family and fatherhood, about travel, growing up, and loss. As Carl Phillips writes in his introduction to the collection, “we become more estranged, it seems, not only from others but from ourselves—who we were, who we remember being, or what we think we remember, which is different from knowing.” In the ekphrastic poem, “Postcard of Peter Lorre Embracing Lotte Lenya, 1929,” Schutt sees in the image his “young father…[laying] the groundwork for divorce.”

Schutt is at his best when his poems are at once intimate and confessional, traditional and restrained. His work is personal and public, domestic and international. Even in death, the poems are full of life. He examines, then peels layers back slowly, revealing—in stunning and accessible language—complicated and difficult truths.

Douglas Watson. The Era of Not Quite. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd, 2013. 147 pp. $14.00, paper.

If, as the book Hal Walker returns to the library in the opening scene of “The Era of Not Quite” suggests, the Era of Not Quite has been “running continuously since the dawn of human history,” it would explain a lot. In fact, it would explain everything: from unrequited love to a man’s brain in the street. For what it means to live in the Era of Not Quite is to reach for a thing, and not quite seize it. And then to keep reaching.

Watson is a very smart writer, and unlike many uses of that word—“smart”—in this context, I mean it here as a compliment, not a way to dismiss a work as technically clever but lacking heart or sincerity. Watson’s thoughts on this tension illustrate his sensibility as a writer: “I do think heart, or ‘heart,’ is important to my fiction—or any good fiction. Of course, you need blood too, or ‘blood.’ Can’t have one without the other. The mysterious stuff of life, in other words.”

Thus, on one hand, The Era of Not Quite is a stunning example of Barthes’ notion of the “writerly text,” a text that challenges the reader by constantly calling attention to its constructed nature (think Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”). Some of the greatest pleasures of Watson’s collection are the jokes he plays on the reader. For example, there are two distinct characters named “Douglas Watson” in The Era of Not Quite, and in the middle of the book, there is a…story? (one wonders what exactly to call it) titled “Special Advertising Section,” in which the marketing division of the Estate of Douglas Watson apologizes for the fact that The Era of Not Quite is not a novel.

On the other hand, because everything in the collection is in tension with its opposite—especially play and sincerity—this is a book in which literary criticism literally kills and the clever theories of music critics lead one narrator to complain, “Talk about missing the point.” This is because for Watson, the smart stuff isn’t about technical or philosophical bravado—it’s about fun. When I asked him about maintaining this tricky balance in his work, he called in an answer from Playland: “Well, the best way to strike a balance is to stand on two feet. If you stand on just the play foot, you’ll fall over into Playland. And if you stand on just the sincerity foot, you’ll tip over and be completely lost in Sincerityland, which is an even worse place to be than Playland, believe me.” Then suddenly he was serious: “My mother, who loved words and was better at them than I am, once approvingly quoted someone—I don’t remember who—as saying that anyone who thought words were mainly for communication was a fool. I’m paraphrasing. The best thing to do with words was have fun with them, the person said. Maybe it was even a quote on the Scrabble box, for all I can remember. My mom and I played a lot of Scrabble, and I’m happy to say that she won more than her share of our games, even toward the end when she was really very sick and didn’t have much energy.”

Watson isn’t much of a self-promoter, and he’s a fairly private person. He was open, though, about the way his mother’s recent death inevitably affected many of the stories in the collection: “I wrote The Era of Not Quite at a time when I was confronting death and loss and grief for the first time—I mean in a big way, in my immediate family. So I didn’t have patience for the small stuff. You know: ‘Bill drank a glass of milk. It made him think of milk paint. He’d been wanting to change the color of his living-room walls, but the question was, Which color was the right one?’ What I would say to Bill is, Who cares? Don’t you know you’re going to die? Get outside and get some exercise or something.”

This urgency pervades all of the stories in The Era of Not Quite. Most are quite short, and if the main character isn’t dead by the end, it’s probably because they’re talking right at you (one of the best pieces in the collection, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation,” is a dramatic monologue delivered from a cynical teacher to her alternately inattentive and smart-alecky students). Some of the stories read like fables and accordingly cut right to the chase: “Long ago, when fate governed the lives of mortals, there was a lad whose lot in life was to love a girl whose lot in life was to be abducted by a fearsome dragon.” Note: if you’re a bit put off by characters named “lad,” “girl” or “boy,” don’t be. For here, appearing where it shouldn’t, is my thesis, in two parts: 1) you can’t forget that a character in a book by Douglas Watson is just a character in a book by Douglas Watson, and 2) you’ll care about that character anyway.

The best way to test this thesis is to read “Wolves,” previously published in The Journal Issue 35.1, a story that uses structural innovation for profound emotional impact. The story left me so stunned, I had to ask Watson about its genesis. He said, “I wrote ‘Wolves’ in the year after my mother died, so there’s a direct tie-in. But I just wrote the thing—for a workshop I was in, actually—and then other people pointed out that I was dealing in symbols. Rather heavy-handed ones at that. And I said, Huh, you’re right. But I’d had no idea. But I mean, there’s music, there’s a church, there’s a library. None of them provides any comfort or any answers. And then the wolves come at you. That’s what it’s like to lose your mother.”

At the same time, Watson emphasizes that the story isn’t autobiography: “The autobiographical stuff might partly explain how I came to write it, but the story is not a coded message whose true subject is me. A story can mean many things to many people, and that is one reason I prefer fiction to nonfiction. And books to life.”

Of course I’d be remiss not to remind you that there are twenty-two more stories like “Wolves” waiting for you—wolf-like—in Watson’s collection. For like his character Jacob Livesey, the experimental composer, Watson’s best stuff “evoke[s] the twin longings that t[ear], although not asunder, the inner lives of many of his contemporaries: the desire for repetition” (that’s “heart,” the stuff you nod over, weeping) “and the hunger for something—anything—new” (and that’s play).

Enjoy.

Michelle Chan Brown. Double Agent. Tucson, AZ: Kore Press, 2012. 80 pp. $14.00, paper.

Michelle Chan Brown’s mischievous debut, Double Agent, clears a wider space for both spying (loosely defined) and expatriation in poetry. Old tensions make their appearances—strained relationships, illicit love affairs—along with a menagerie of devices from slant rhyme to aggressively enjambed free verse. Yet the book’s foreignness is unavoidable. Set in a version of the Eastern bloc, Brown’s speaker guides readers on a sort of participant-observer tour where language and vision become alien.

While travel is a familiar topic, Brown makes it unfamiliar with terse, streetwise paranoia, as if Pynchon were made to write with a telegraph. Even in the table of contents, the reader is introduced to an amorphous hostility with titles like “Semi-Domesticated Arsonist” and “The Newlywed’s Guide to Hunting.” And the poems themselves brim with the cold surrealism of espionage. In “Enemy,” she claims, “Genial. Harmless as a new hat. / That is the way of plagues.” One feels the line becoming a contested boundary, a space for gamesmanship and deceit. But while some poets get drunk on these sorts of hijinks, the reader questions neither Brown’s cleverness nor her seriousness. In the same poem: “They’ll eat off the family tree. / History told them: no one ever starved / for love. The mother darned / old flags for their cadavers.”

Danger suffuses the poems’ imagery as well. One senses a sardonic version of T.S. Eliot in “Open House,” where Brown chillingly puns on the crowd: “They are pillars of society. Hence the faces of stone.” And here, she confronts paranoia embodied:

       My mother was afraid of her fingers.

       She squirreled them in the dry crevices
       of the furniture. Desiccate there, little liars,

       she’d croon, rocking herself into her fear….

Threats loom in and out in the forms of a hypnotist, lovers, even (seriously) rabbits. And though these threats seem to emanate, as the setting might suggest, from a Cold War ambiance, the book treats the setting not as an engine for dried-up politicking, but for aesthetic exploration. In the first of the “Autobiography” series, the speaker watches “The windmills hum their song / through the nuclear plants. A time, / a time for kindling.” Elsewhere, “The potatoes’ eye-sockets disapprove of her dye job.”

But beyond all else, Brown’s capacity for whimsy and spontaneity makes these poems memorable. One always senses wryness at the margins, a resistance against the poems’ bent for bleakness. Lines like “Our talk was small enough for the laden table” suggest a sort of high-society Dick Tracy. In the sassy and heartbreaking “Pleasuring the Enemy,” she writes, “You give a leather mask a real personality. I feel / the edge of every bad-sex dream / knifing its merry way under my eyelids.” Too often in poetry, such bold posturing sounds desperate. Here, though, the speaker’s bravado reveals the sadness surrounding her, the fears she has learned to live with.

And those moments of oblique vulnerability lead, unmistakably, to compassion. She offers these beautiful lines from the end of “Shipwreck”:

       We were used to solitude. Some of us
       had worked the mills, where skylights cracked
       and loaned us stars. We learned to relish
       the ownership of hours. Our sheets
       acceded to the torpor. If you must
       call it sickness—the sea colonized us.
       Below muslin, our heartbeats thrilled,
       lazy as laps. Breezes licked our faces flat.
       If we wept, we wept soundless as sand.
       What wave would betray our trust?

Caesuras resolve to an uninterrupted line as alliteration emerges and end-stops become insistent. The utterance, as if realizing its own entanglement in punctuation, gives up its declarations for a question. Here and elsewhere, the speaker opens herself to clarity, so when cleverness and confidence return, they feel different—more complicated.
As with any distinctive voice, the possibility for cloying the reader is virtually unavoidable, and there are one or two poems the collection could thrive without. But taken as a whole, Double Agent successfully rides its formal flexibility and vocal daring from beginning to end. The title, of course, prefaces the intrigue found in the subject matter, but it also points to the spying found here and in all good poetry: excitement both in what is revealed and how that revelation happens.