PEG
DUTHIE meditates on
80 Beetles by Mark Cunningham
(Otoliths, Australia, 2008)
Elegies for Michael Gizzi by William Corbett
with Drawings by Natalia Afentoulidou
(Kat Ran Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012)
Controlled Hallucinations by John Sibley
Williams
(FutureCycle Press, 2013)
In a
November 22, 2013, edition of the New
York Times, David Orr presented "Points of Entry," an essay in
which he travels from unpacking the notion of "accessibility" . . .
The first thing to note about the wrangling
over accessibility is that it encompasses an array of anxieties, some of them
self-contradictory and most of them unimportant. Often it's just a proxy for a
centuries-old squabble between people who like their poems plain-looking and
people who like them a little more rococo. Because both styles can be
immediately appealing to readers, it's not clear what access has to do with any
of this.
. . . to
declaring, in conclusion, that "when we
talk about accessibility, we should remember that poetry, unlike churches and
fortresses, has never loved a wall." This claim had me wondering how hard
Orr might have been hitting the hard cider while drafting his closing
paragraph. Before I looked up Orr's piece, I had been directed by friends on
Twitter to Kasey Jueds's blog post "On Difficulty" (http://kaseyjueds.com/on-difficulty/)
and to David Sedaris's conversation with Susan Wheeler and Curtis Fox on being
agreeably flummoxed by Wheeler's writing (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/4550).
In my experience, mileage among poetry readers does not merely vary: it is as
likely to scramble up gatework and jab peepholes through grout as it is to
sidle up to a bar with comfortable stools and closed-captioned TVs.
I did
not read "Points of Entry" when it was first published; what brought
it to my attention was Joshua Weiner's response to it in the December 15 New York Times Book Review. Weiner states
that "accessibility is not the issue -- that's a false gambit in Orr's
column. The issue is the quality of the sympathy a reader brings to the project
of reading new poems and rereading the poems she likes."
I've
been pondering expectations of both accessibility and sympathy as I assess the
three collections I agreed to review for this issue of GR. Put baldly, I wasn't moved by any of them. The titles were
intriguing, and I was eager to be enchanted, or at least to experience the kind
of emotional zing I'd felt on reading, say, Denise Duhamel's
"Expired" (in Enjoy Hot or Iced,
which I reviewed for GR 18), or
Rebecca Hazelton's work in the Poetry Foundation archives (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rebecca-hazelton#about).
But I just didn't get beyond nodding "that's nice" here and there.
It
reminds me of relationships: sometimes there isn't any chemistry between a good
poem and a reasonable reader, even when there are common points of interest.
Which raises the question: who might the right readers for these three
collections be?
In the
case of 80 Beetles, the personal ad
might read, "80 prose poems ISO surrealism-minded playmate." The
poems are named after beetles, but I think it's anyone's guess how the
sentences underneath each title relate to the title or even each other. They
remind me of my Twitter timeline and how it mashes together mystery-infused
micropoems and way-of-the-world declarations. You could make a game out of
constructing how the author got from the title to the body (or vice versa) of
each poem. Some specimens:
from "Grass-root Beetle I":
I was so tired that any position I laid in was
uncomfortable. I just noticed how close "I laid" is to "Iliad."
from "Underwater Weevil":
I'm not sure if I'm playing catch-and-release with my ego or
my ego is playing catch-and-release with me.
from "Snail-eating Ground Beetle":
I was opposed to her thumbs but not her toes. The outline of
South Carolina is the same as that of the Exxon Tiger, minus its tail, since
South Carolina is human.
from "Narrow-waisted Bark Beetle":
Ah, humanism: I knew I was a horse's ass because I was
staring right at the ass of the guy who was the front of the horse.
Controlled
Hallucinations comprises 63 untitled poems, labeled by roman
numerals, as well as a 64th poem preceding the sequence as a sort of preface.
It was interesting to compare Controlled
Hallucinations to 80 Beetles --
it's trade-sized, as opposed to the pocket dimensions of Beetles, and it comes across as larger in scope as well as physical
dimension. The tone and sensibility remind me of Jack Gilbert's work: the
diction is plain and spare, the world messy and immense, the narrator a man
intent on grappling with how "nothing quite fits" (I), and how he
remains separate from the spaces presented to him -- "What if the seats
are all empty / and still I cannot sit?"
(XVIL) -- even while claiming to be "part of the rest of the
world" (XVL) and how "with ease, I enter into all things / and
dissolve" (XXVL).
The first numbered poem begins with a vision the
narrator imagines slicing apart, element by element -- man, roof, tools,
shingles, mountain, and "the hydrangeas / the shingles decapitate / on
their way down" -- and the language of wounds and blades reappears through
the collection:
"The paper cut on my palm
/ runs parallel to my love line" (X).
"I carve up my mother /
with the delicate edges of leaves … I cut tomorrow into flavorless little
chunks" (X).
"Hurry first incision, /
dull blade, / and the sharper pain / of needle and thread" (XXXL).
"The knives I display in
this poem / cannot even cut an overripe fruit" (XXXIX).
"[The artists have] carved
a perfect / representation of / "Human Body: Alive" / on the stark
ivory lid" (XLVII).
"Forks and knives dull, /
teeth worn down, / I am left to eat / in broken English" (XLVIII).
"Each nameless roadside
creek / is born of curious scissors" (LVIL).
The poems invoking white canes (as a symbol of
blindness) didn't work for me, nor did declarations such as "I am naked /
but for a T-shirt / and the choices I made" (XXIII) or "I concede
that there is no true nudity left" (XLIX). On the other hand, I would have
enjoyed seeing more of phrases such as "The piano in the corner bares its
teeth" (XXXIII) and "Each morning the clock mislays one second / and
another as I wind back its hand" (LVI). "I shall wear . . . the
strange eroticism of Greek statues, / limbs cleaved and missing" (LX)
strikes me as very Gilbertian, as does the poet's insistence within the same
poem that "I will leave nothing to its own forgetting."
I did not know Michael Gizzi, and I wonder if
William Corbett's tributes to him would resonate more with me if I had. The
book is well designed -- good paper, crisp printing -- and Natalia
Afentoulidou's illustrations are intriguingly bizarre: a blue tongue covered
with white polka-dots sticks out of a quasi-pear-shaped organ with a dowel-like
handle. Another image suggests the body of a mermaid, with a thick tentacle
piercing her midsection and a gigantic bead-and-stem tandem emerging out of her
headless torso.
It's assumed that if you are reading these, you
are well acquainted with twentieth-century poetry-- Corbett invokes Frank
O'Hara, John Wieners, Paul Violi, and others, and "Obit" is a
surname-only recitation of death-spaces ("Roethke in a swimming pool /
Schwartz outside his hotel room"). Of the sixteen poems in the book, I
felt that "March Glare" was the most accessible:
Michael:
I'll believe
You're
dead when you
Don't
show up for
Trevor's
birthday dinner…
Inside the front cover (and repeated in "About Michael
Gizzi," after the last poem), the author provides a non-bio of Gizzi by
directing the reader to the Internet, adding that "you may guess that he was
one of those generous souls who served poets and poetry." "Bad," Corbett's spin on
Gottfried Benn's "What Is Bad" (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/238020),
effectively complements this statement with its definition of "Very
bad": "listening to various
parties / Argue why you didn't have to die / And you can't send them to time
out."
Corbett is of my parents' generation ("The computer I
can't master" was a tell, as were cultural references such as "I'll
be Alan Hale to your Errol Flynn"), and reading the collection felt like
peeking into an uncle's yearbook, its portraits of a different time and a
different community. Then again, certain characters are universal: "One of
our tribe / Will read too long, / Check the time / And continue on"
("Memorial Reading for Michael Gizzi").
*****
Peg Duthie is the author of Measured Extravagance (Upper Rubber Boot, 2012). Her poems can be
found online at The Poetry Storehouse (http://poetrystorehouse.com/2013/10/18/peg-duthie-poems-2/),
as well as in "The Critics Write Poems" section of GR 18 (http://galatearesurrection18.blogspot.com/).
No comments:
Post a Comment