Collections of poetry
criticism, dormant for a spell in Canada, have erupted in the past two years.
Carmine Starnino’s Lazy Bastardism, James Pollock’s You Are Here (both reviewed on this
site), and others I’ve yet to get to have provided context on, and assessment
for, contemporary poets, as well as needed looking glasses into the hours-only
shifting sands of poetics. Jason Guriel’s The Pigheaded Soul, published
last year by The Porcupine’s Quill, is another compilation, a generous roll call
of thirty poetry reviews, essays and retrospectives, journalistic “atmosphere”
pieces on poetry readings, a memorial, a music review, a thematic review of two
novels, a general review of poetry within prose, and a review of an essayistic
compilation of poets opening up on pre-poem impulses. I’ve given my opinions on
Daryl Hine, Eric Ormsby, Anne Carson, Dennis Lee, and Don Coles in the
aforementioned books by Starnino and/or Pollock, so I’ll just mention in
passing that Guriel’s take on those poets shares evaluative force and specific,
similar criticisms with those other assessments (Hine, yes – Ormsby, yes –
Carson, mostly yes – Coles, yes – Lee, “Godno”.) And because of the breadth of
the compilation, the unkind math involved in the undeviating sweep of the clock’s
second-hand, and other books piling up like cordwood in October, I’ll have to
severely limit my engagement with the essays to several choices. But I’ll back
up.
Surely Guriel’s most
provocative contention in the introduction is his Kleinzahler-aligned applause
of poetry as “[e]ntertainment, escapism – these are feats enough”. Rather than
expanding in a joyful explication his definition would warrant (two previous
quotes from poems of Sarah and Coluccio don’t support his argument, the first example
clever but slight, and the second, in lockstep iambic tetrameter, a shopworn
consideration of the writer’s wish for the everlasting freshness of his words),
Guriel settles back into the role of scold after a momentary half-smile. His
next sentence is a botched, slumberous variation which, even were it a sardonic
aping of the self-appointed vatic emphatics, assumes too much – “[f]ar too many
readers of poetry prefer to flatter themselves with the splendid thought that
the thoughtful work they read (and write) is food for thought”. Well, I’d
submit that that extreme is equally countered by its opposite: poem as joke, as
cool persona, as ironic elbow-to-the-ribs before the channel change. There are
several problems with Guriel’s assertion but, for time considerations, I’ll
limit my response to the main one: it’s a lie. Shakespeare, of course, created
mouthwatering rhythms from diction frequently his own (neologists aren’t cute,
they’re ambitious). But his plays have also been hotly debated for their political
meanings, their psychological and philosophical insights, their moral knots and
revelations, and their emotional ambiguities. Milton was a great thinker, and
not just in his urgent political tracts. Dante was no slouch, nor were Blake
and D. H. Lawrence. More recent examples? Lesser lights, sure, but I learned,
as a sprout, when indoors, more about human nature and grace from Layton and
Gustafson than when reading historical overviews or cultural op eds. Of course
great poetry doesn’t need complex thought. And thought without a joy in
its encapsulated language is stillborn. But thought doesn’t, willy nilly,
cancel out entertainment and delight.
And at the outset, just to posit this forced choice is false. Thought,
as Guriel often derides that word or procedure
in poetry, means, for him, messaging, or more accurately, bald or simplistic or
hectoring messaging. Get that baby out of the bathwater! But I go on so, so
I’ll go on.
I’m lukewarm or cuke-cool
on much of the poetry of Kay Ryan, so I was eager to read Guriel’s take on her
poetry since he thinks her (I believe) North America’s greatest living
practitioner. In his book’s titular essay, the conceit is ineffectual. Written
from the perspective of a reviewer in the 2030s, anything said could just as
easily be made clear now, especially so since the Guriel stand-in loves to
praise his case study by the contrast of beating with a ruler her unworthy
contemporaries. The Ryan promoter tells us all poets are now Ryan-influenced,
“so much so that her concise, linear style ... is the default setting for
versifiers”. Guriel, later, has fun with that “reality” when he cites a poem by
a Frank Hoaks in The New Yorker (the reviewer shows a welcome
consideration in tipping his hand). In its skinny lines, aphoristic ambition,
gear-shifting enjambment and last-word rhyme, Guriel may be gently pummeling
acolytes trying to make a name for themselves riding the jacket flaps of the
great, but his exercise, though a pale imitation of a Ryan poem, nevertheless undercuts
some of the limitations of the California poet. Ryan -- and Guriel surely must
love this about her -- is transitional about meaning, preferring, in step and often,
to shift from the concrete to the general in the closing line or three by way
of ironic juxtaposition. At her best, as in “Against Gravity”, Ryan delivers
the shock from a vague appreciation of perseverance to the ominous specifics of
“Because we’re glad some mornings,/and buoyant, as though we had/no bombs or
appointments”. In other poems, “Half A Loaf” being a good example, Ryan’s
beguiling, casual metaphorical horror of “The whole loaf’s loft/is halved in
profile,/like the standing side/of a bombed cathedral” ends in the deflating
and unnecessary “I say do not adjust to half/unless you must”. At her worst,
Ryan has the contemporary disease – no different than a legion of other
versifiers filling out the requirements of one-issue-and-out litzines – of
vagueness masquerading as profundity, as in “Miners’ Canaries”, where
“Something is always/testing the edges/of the breathable -- /not so sweet, not
so yellow,/but something is always/living at the wrong edge/of the arable;
something/is always excused first”. I’m writing a bit of a review of Ryan’s The
Best Of It myself, but I’d hoped that Guriel would’ve focused more
on a review-proper, on the specific charms or revelations of a poet he reveres,
instead of setting down a three-page biographical preamble and a concluding
two-page hoax, critical history, and future speculation. The middle half deals
with poems, but mostly summarily, in overview, though when he does delve into a
particular poem, her “Turtle”, I couldn’t disagree more with the
interpretation, in which the reptile’s movements somehow demonstrated her
“advocacy of underdogs of all stripes”. This may be true of Ryan, when
considering her prose and her personal life. I wouldn’t know. But the poem –
the only consideration – is a different animal. Though Ted Hughes and D. H.
Lawrence wrote excellent poems of beast and bird, they could also arrogantly
draw thought bubbles above the heads of their illiterate studies. Ryan’s
“Turtle”, unfortunately, belongs to the latter set, with its, “She lives/below
luck-level, never imagining some lottery/will change her load of pottery to
wings.” But change is a human hope, and hope is made possible by an awareness
of past and future. Animals don’t have that capacity, which can be a curse, but
in this case surely a blessing. The turtle doesn’t need the poet’s misplaced
compassion – (Who knows, from the poem’s last line, not quoted in Guriel’s
essay, that the turtle is “chastened”?) – but maybe the reader chancing upon
Ryan for the first time, via Guriel, does.
When Guriel wants to, he
can dig into the guts and grace of a particular poem with an insightful
revelation and assessment. Multiple essays in The Pigheaded Soul
demonstrate this. But the practice is sporadic, and one almost always gets the
sense that the microscopic view is just a researcher’s required footnotes, a
dispassionate accommodation to the exigencies of the reviewer’s job
description. His prime passion, as I’ve made the point, is the overview,
including the historical placement, the (sometimes) willful and cross-genre
comparisons, the insights gleaned from an author’s life, away from and at the
writer’s desk. This is all quite interesting, but (asks the reader, and
certainly the author under consideration), what about the poems? Well, if
you’re looking to be enlightened on the poetry of Charles Bernstein in Guriel’s
essay “Words Fail Him”, on that American language poet and guru, you’re out of
luck. The procedure mentioned above is amplified. Clocking in at twenty pages –
the longest word count of any essay in the book – it’s apparent the topic (not,
ever, just the poems) is an important one for the reviewer. Guriel instigates
the attack with a bewildering medley of meta-analyses. A high school friend’s
poem is endearingly mocked (“This/is/a/poem.”). Language poetry is then
castigated by its very definition. Other language poets are mini-critiqued
(Hejinian, Perelman) by way of one poem-fragment apiece. A reactionary and
silly defense is made for poems that dare to appear unthreatening on first
read: “But what’s so bad about kicking back with a poem that conjures the
illusion of a speaker serving up a clear message in a linear way? (What’s so
bad about a good read?) And why do these curious peoples, the Language poets,
want to take the reader by the lapels and jostle her so?” To the last question:
I don’t know, maybe they got (and get) tired of poems that “entertain” and have
nothing to say? Guriel’s welcome to his preferences, of course. We all have
them, and it’s best (and credit to Guriel) to admit them. But there is so much
that is assumed in the above quotation, I’ll try to be concise with my
response. There’s nothing wrong with a good read, of course. Maybe others (and
I’m one) are entertained, at times, by non-linear writing as well as “clear
message[s]”. (I thought Guriel was against messaging?) An antagonistic
my-team-or-nothing view seems not just narrow-sighted, but narrow-minded. And
in an age of exponential distraction, the poet’s initial job (essentially, to
get noticed) is as hard as it’s ever been. A little lapel-shaking ain’t
necessarily a bad thing, and it doesn’t always mean that a poet’s doing so in bad
faith. If it seems I’m far from any Bernstein sighting, I’m just following
Guriel’s lead. Nothing yet on the poet’s All the Whiskey in Heaven,
Bernstein’s large Selected. But at least we’ve thrashed through the underbrush
and are now within range of the perplexing, though not-so-rare, black
wildebeest in the clearing. Responding to an early essay by Bernstein, Guriel
asserts that “surely there are those who aren’t much startled by the [language
poems’] disruptions, having encountered them before”. He fixes on this point,
with minor variations, throughout this “review” of Bernstein’s 2010 Selected,
his most forceful point being that the reader must first be transmitted into
reverie before any startling can occur. But these words – startle, jostle,
disruption -- have to be used with great care. (Bernstein – and the language
poets – get sympathy, from me, here.)
It’s true that in their fractured syntax, grammatical tricks and
subversions, lack (at times) of referents, disjointed narratives, harsh shifts
in tone, a Gurielesque prosecution of opacity and willful disdain for the
reader may make sense. But each reader has to account for his own experiences.
After the initial “jostling”, the effect of Bernstein’s poetry, for me, isn’t
one of confusion or frustration, but of play, of seeing how it matches with
meaning and emotion. I can’t do that yet, though, because the reviewer is still
haranguing all language poets for the supposed sins of their forebears. All
language poets are alike, apparently because one passage of a 1994 Bernstein
poem is “similar in sound” (yes, that’s the finely-tuned exegesis) to that of a
Jackson Mac Low 1964 fragment and a Gertrude Stein poem-snippet of 1914. But
this is ridiculous. The poems are quite different in structure, rhythm, and tone
(I’m not typing them all out here, and for illustrative purposes, they can’t be
excised. Pp 236-7, though.) Guriel finishes his preamble with, “his gumming up
of grammar, his juxtaposition of words that are a typewriter’s slip away from
one another: these are reliable licks in a repertoire, the ones you play if you
want to count yourself part of Official Avant-Garde Culture.” This is unfair,
based, so far, on one Bernstein poem-fragment. But now, the review of the
Selected itself begins.
Guriel states that
Bernstein’s “subject matter is usually the opacity of words” after stating that
it’s “not the transcript of a coherent voice with something on its mind”. This
contradiction, amazingly, trumps itself in the next paragraph, where Guriel
lists several meanings apparent throughout the Selected, including, “wary of
walls and boundaries”, “looks askance at the corporate world and the myth of
the self-determining individual”, and “not without a sense of humour” (the
double negative here is a grudging, faint-praise nod to one of Bernstein’s
strengths). I mentioned earlier that Guriel is at his best when investigating
an actual poem, but even this is overstating the case. He’s most concerned with
parsing poem fragments, as evidenced by his handling of a section of Ryan’s
“Turtle”, already explored by me in that essay. (All Ryan’s poems are short, so
a full-poem quotation would have been easy, though it also would have shown how
his point was compromised.) The best demonstration, though, of Guriel’s missing
the forest for a glance at a pine needle begins with his perusal of Bernstein’s
first poem in All the Whiskey in Heaven, “Asylum”. It’s not an
auspicious start. Bernstein’s “rooms, suites of rooms, buildings, plants//in
line” is criticized by Guriel for its missed connection of not just “in line”,
but “words in a line – a line of
poetry!” (Italics are in the original text.) Guriel continues: “Bernstein
borrows some images from Goffman, of bounded spaces. But he also cracks wise
with a pun, reminding those of us bookworms who might otherwise relax into the
reverie of reading that the images, far from being firm representations of the
things of the world, are made of words, words, words. ... He leaves his
sentences in tatters, ironically enough.//In other words, it’s hard to get a
grip on “Asylum”, which is always unravelling.” Flabbergasting. Remember, this
is the conclusion Guriel asserts after quoting less than two lines of a 16 page
poem. Yes, those lines are also lines in poetry. Even the most representational
of poets realizes (or should) that their words are just manipulations of
reality, messed with, loaded with multiple or ambiguous meanings, ordered in
syntactical originality, presented with an organic feel for nuanced tone within
the temporal shifts of the whole poem. What is Guriel actually arguing (or
arguing for) here? Bernstein’s aim, even in this small sample, is fairly easy
to decipher. Guriel damns the sentence tatters as “ironic”, but it’s Guriel
who’s obtusely ironic in not recognizing Bernstein’s fine mating of style with
content (the disjunction – not breakdown – of language with the mental states
experienced in a 1976 mental institution, as they were called in
pre-politically incorrect times). If one can’t be circular, oblique, and
grammatically challenging, in this context, then I’m not sure when a
non-linear approach would be accepted. The further irony, though, is that most
of “Asylum” is fairly easy to parse. But one wouldn’t know that with only
Guriel’s essay to go by. The poem gathers in condemnatory strength and anger,
convincingly so. Guriel’s introductory slam of Bernstein’s nothing “on his
mind” vanishes in poem one, with “booing, tray thumping, mass food
rejection/mutinies; but these/plateaus of disinvolvement/broken (as
they/disciplined, moralistic, monochromatic/sponsor an ideal” and “lectures,
art classes or woodworking classes, card playing//industrial alcohol, nutmeg,
or ginger//of dead sea in//vivid, encapturing//outside. This//sharp smell of
fresh air//pass//the loss of failure//circles from which” (The last quote
closes the poem, although closes isn’t the right word.) Guriel’s attack
continues, though, seemingly oblivious to the dramatic narrative: “Perhaps,
then, that’s why the poem is so fragmented: it’s fomenting an uprising against
the institution of grammar!” Or perhaps Bernstein is making the case for
rationality transitioning into its insane paradoxical bed partner, and its use
in all sorts of oppressive behaviour, backed by the state and the good
housekeeping seal of approval. This is, after all, what kicked off the
high-modern hijinks of a more difficult time in engaged meaning with poets,
novelists, playwrights and painters. “A war to end all wars”, and the like,
have a tendency to anger and disturb. Guriel continues, in his next poem-“review”,
this of Bernstein’s devastating social scorch, “Standing Target”. Here, and
finally, to his credit, Guriel allows for four fairly extended passages of the
twelve-page offering, after which he summarizes, in part, “these creeps [are
also] associated with the most criminally banal examples of language in
Bernstein’s poem. If only little Charlie were left to his own devices and
allowed to play freely in the muck of pure language -- instead of being
harangued into ‘organized games’ where he has to side with a team – he might
avoid a career in advertising or, worse, turning out like like DeMotte [the
corporation man mocked earlier in the poem]. He might become a Language poet,
given to explosive outbursts.” Now, this is a curious conclusion, this ad hominem
sneer. First, Guriel is bending backwards to find meaning, interesting on its
own for someone so averse to even care about meaning (generally) in poetry. So
why he’d try even harder here is revealing. Is it because Bernstein’s politics
and social concerns are antithetical to his? He references them quite a bit
throughout these twenty pages, the “left-wing axe to grind”, among other
biographical fixations. I have an issue, too, with much of Bernstein’s politics
(not so much with the particular direction, more so its simplicity), but one
needn’t care about pinpoint advocacy to feel compassion for one’s own (and
others’, of course) experiences growing up in a school system rife with
do-gooding half-wits, malicious drones, and other psychologically stunted
stooges of administrators who get their coin by the sequestered robotic
Spock-lite (not the sci-fi one) parameters of condescending report card-ese.
It’s a widespread North American concern, a critical one, even one changed for
the worse since 1980, if journalistic and academic and anecdotal accounts are
indicators, and certainly nothing that warrants a cynical and misguided putdown
on the putative petulance of a still-infantile Bernstein. But the focus on
Bernstein’s insidious program continues through to the end of the long essay:
“Thank You for Saying Thank You” is an “anti-poem”. I hate the too-easy,
sneering anti-poem, as well. But does Bernstein’s poem qualify as one? No. It’s
an anti-a-particular-kind-of poem, a different matter altogether. Guriel,
through his long compilation, sneers as good as Bernstein ever gives (and if
Bernstein is “a little too hot”, then Guriel is much too separated and cool)
when critiquing, holus-bolus, avant-garde poetry. Why shouldn’t Bernstein get
the same allowance for castigating the paint-by-numbers emotionality of a
prefab lyric in fifteen precious lines? One could argue, as I’ve done, that
bald poetics should remain in essays, not in poems, much like the government
should stay away from the pulpit (or more accurately, the choral bench), but
the sentiments expressed in “Thank You for Saying Thank You”, the target of
which is poetry of positive reader-regard, “like kite/flying and fly/fishing”,
are on the mark, and, ironically, something I’d think Guriel would applaud in a
different form, perhaps even in a different mode. His response, immediately
following the bizarre, “[i]t reads like the venting of someone who was jilted
by a New Yorker poet”, which itself is deposited immediately before the
following quote (though this latter is to a different poem in the book which
Guriel doesn’t reference) reads, “it’s no great act of iconoclasm to snicker at
some neo-Romantic who goes looking for his soul in ‘the song of a minor bird’
or who objectifies women. I mean, who doesn’t hate that guy?” It may not
be iconoclastic, but it’s also not hiding behind criticisms of the dead. “Thank
You for Saying Thank You” was written in 2001, and it’s a timely response to
much of the most popular (and critically lauded) poetry of the 90s, both in
Canada and the U.S., the poetry of sincere, inoffensive, even-tempered
coffee table books. A few pages later, we’re treated to another sarcastic
excuse for exposition: I don’t go for the anaphoric monotony of “Let’s Just
Say”, but there are a few good lines, one of which Guriel shits on in a
typically superficial phrase. Bernstein’s line? “Let’s just say that I
encounter myself not in the mirror but in the manure.” Too pat? Maybe. But does
it earn Guriel’s, “the speaker has shit on his face”? Even if we only interpret
the line on its surface, it’s obviously figurative, emphasizing that one’s
deficiencies are more instructive than one’s delusional self-regard. (One
typically postures, and puts on make-up, in front of the mirror.) But “manure”
also grows what we need to survive. Is that such a stretch for a critic who’s
also a poet? Again, I don’t think the poem works, but the snide and empty
assumptions, “Here are some of [the lines], should you care to concentrate”,
don’t illuminate. Guriel is now in the homestretch. “[R]eaders have adjusted to
poetry shot through with disruptions; indeed, they fairly expect them”. Which
readers are these? Other avant-garde readers, perhaps. But doesn’t the opposite
point hold for Bernstein, then? Don’t readers of the anecdotal or imagined
lyric expect, in a history far longer and more deeply entrenched, that minor
epiphanies will arrive, in the last line of the half-page, with a slightly sad
or slightly smiley expression? And aren’t reader expectations, however
superficial, separate from the procedures and qualities of specific poems from
either camp? In other words, are poets responsible for the complacencies of
their readers? This is all too easy, this macro-dumping on avant-garde poetry.
I’ve expressed my disgust with a lot of it, in reviews of specific books, and
in proactive poetics. But that’s the point. Books should be reviewed for what’s
between the pages, not as soldiers in a long line of casualties in an ongoing
war. It’d be nice if Bernstein’s poems, delightfully various and rich with
sound, feeling, and sense, could’ve gotten a deliberate airing in the expanded
word count. But Guriel has formed an opinion on avant-garde poetry, and has
framed his argument with misconstrued examples from several poems. God knows,
if that’s the route one takes, it’s easy pickings: pretentious nonsense like
“Virtual Reality” won’t win Bernstein many new converts. But Guriel’s also
failed to note, never mind comment on, other worthy poems, and lines of poems
in All the Whiskey in Heaven. There’s the effervescent (in part) “Dark
City”, with its wonderful, “She that peeps through a hole will kiss/the wave
that troubled her”, which, aside from its delightful rhythm, also makes a case
for following one’s obsession, not getting psychoanalyzed out of it. (An aphorism
similar in sentiment comes four lines later with, “A stumble may/prevent a fall
but a fall guy’s/my kind of man.”) There’s the songlike “Rivulets of the Dead
Jew” ‘s “Don’t dance with me/’til I cut my tie/Cut my tie, cut my tie/Don’t
fancy me ‘til/The rivers run dry/& a heh & a hi & a ho”. There’s
the great success, of “Report From Liberty Street”, in balancing tones –
puzzled, wondrous, rational – of (then) recent post 9/11 with its near-finish
challenge (which shouldn’t need to be voiced, but is needed), “The
question isn’t is art up for this but what else is art for?”. There’s the
sublime poem, “Mall At Night”, which I’ll quote in full:
“There is no shade in the
forest
when we beat our wings
against the moss
& tear the petals off
the spruce
revealing what’s never
said but
spoken, companion to
discordant facts
stacked three foot high
above the drawers
clogging corridors.
Consonance is this
world’s only comfort,
stony stare of
stars on bleary night,
awake enough
to lose a dozen threads,
invent a baker’s
dozen more for recompense.
The gravel
does not hold, the road
beyond repair,
yet closer to, by far,
than dusk’s approaching
glare.”
None of the above plays
superior tricks with “gum[med] ... grammar” and pretzel syntax on readers, so
Guriel’s assertion – “whenever Bernstein appears readable, whenever he resorts
to traditional devices like alliteration and rhyme, he’s likely having us on” –
is pernicious, even if mistakenly formed. Guriel finally throws his hands up in
a concluding biographical attack, which, again, reveals more about Guriel’s
distaste for an entire poetic movement than it does in enlightening the reader
on actual poems from this one card-carrying member of “Official Avant-Garde
Culture”. After listing Bernstein’s accomplishments as decided on by the word
community, Guriel states, “Language poets, we might conclude [we might
conclude?] lead an ascetic existence early in the life cycle, but later
grow fat and happy. More power to them, I say! Still, I wonder what Bernstein’s
younger self would make of all that power?” This is the best howler yet. The
cynical tone (and the passive-aggressive one), the assumed cynicism of
Bernstein (he was a starving poet, an ascetic, with the paradoxical hope, all
along, of breaching the ivy walls of ... of what, exactly? Poets have “all that
power”? And if others choose to fete Bernstein with titles and fitting
adjectives, that somehow, in itself, reflects poorly on Bernstein? What’s he
supposed to do? Be churlish, a boor behind bad grammar? And if he does,
wouldn’t he then be mocked by Guriel for chasing further notoriety as a reverse
revolutionary? Words fail him, indeed.
“Kevin: Yeah, you ever
hear the one about the middleclass idiots who sort of spend all their time
analyzing their own emotions and writing bullshit poetry, you know, that we’re
supposed to read? I mean, as if we’re fucking interested.
Band (laughs): That’s a
good one.”
-- Dexys Midnight Runners
The above quote is taken
from the prefatory set-up to Guriel’s essay on the novels The Anthologist
by Nicholoson Baker, and The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano. The
essay itself is called “Lovable Losers”, and the top-heavy thematic approach
allows its author the opportunity to make all sorts of pronouncements – some
mildly sympathetic, others withering – about the psychology of little known or
unappreciated poets. The conversation lead-off, from the 80s band (I assume
Guriel is transferring it from a rock bio or article), is interesting in how it
ties into Guriel’s thoughts. Dexys Midnight Runners were pulling in more green
than what the fictional first-person narrator of The Anthologist would
have seen, he of the not insubstantial debt and odd job undertakings, so I’m
not sure who the “middle class” dig is aimed at. And it’s sure not aimed at any
of Arturo Belano’s or Ulysses Lima’s acolytes and lovers, those who spend more
time dreaming in the guts of fire hazards than combing their hair for job
interviews. I also wonder which incarnation of Dexys Midnight Runners this
story is taken from. A later version – 1985 – would have seen Vincent Crane on
its roster, the manic-depressive and brilliant organist/lyricist who wrote many
of the tunes for the underrated, early 70s Atomic Rooster. Those lyrics,
embedded in powerful funk/blues workings, often dealt with suicide, alienation
and social deception. One or both of the formative Kevins in DMR may have
ho-hoed about losers dripping blue tears onto endless pages, but I can’t
imagine Crane participating in it (he committed suicide just four years later),
and when you’re chasing that “fat and happy” zone (Guriel’s assessment of
latter-day Bernstein), it’s doubly rich to note DMR’s constant image and
musical makeover in trying to cash in on that ever-elusive second hit. But the
charming, intelligent, quirky, and passionate (about poetry) Paul Chowder, he
of the fictional wordsmiths, isn’t angling for a new style, or promoting what’s
he’s already written. Guriel’s introduction to The Anthologist is
concise. Mildly respected, once-known poet, procrastinates while trying to
start an introduction to an anthology of rhyming poetry, girlfriend leaves him,
mundane life details take on melancholic significance. OK, the latter isn’t
mentioned by Guriel, but that’s because it doesn’t fit his theme. But let’s get
to the poetry. Chowder’s an odd duck, a prosodist who disbelieves in the
existence of pentameter (it’s tetrameter with a rest), and free verse. But he’s
not a simple grouser of contemporary verse. Despite its apparent “unruliness”,
Chowder enjoys the poetry of Robert Hass. He enthuses over lines of verse in
chestnuts, sure, but his comments can’t be consigned to the bins of cheap
augury and laughable vagary. Nor can his commentary of extra-poetical matters.
But perhaps most endearing are the speculations on the gulf between a canonical
artist’s influence and the odds an unknown has of matching it (call it fame if
you like). “One day the English language is going to perish ... and it will
become a language like Latin that learned people learn... American poetry will
perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human
evolution and therefore will be less perishable.” Like the “losers” in The
Savage Detectives, the obsessive artists are depicted with more than a hint
of sympathy. Guriel states that a huge reason for the popularity of The
Anthologists can be understood “because it enabled that most satisfying
kind of voyeurism: the prolonged peek at oneself.” But this is superficial.
Yes, artists can see the broad outlines of envy, self-pity, struggle, petty
jockeying for political position via
movements and fads, but Chowder is a unique creation and, (once again) I
find Guriel’s descent into a possible autobiographical link to be barking up
the same tree long after the cat’s skedaddled, unaffected and oblivious: “It’s
possible that this Paul Chowder character is little more that a special effect:
the lifelike avatar of an amateur enthusiast named Nicholson Baker, who writes
a stylish novel but hasn’t much of a clue about poems.” Or it’s possible that
Baker knows a great deal more than he’s letting on with his fictional
character, and that he’s plotted out that character consistently,
painstakingly, so that his monologue matches that vision. Guriel gets a little
closer to the bone with his conjecture that “Chowder may well be intended as a
parody of the middle-aged curmudgeon, out of touch with recent doings, but are
most readers – the ones who know little about poetry and just want to read the
new Nicholson Baker novel – going to get the parody?” Why not? Despite the
occasional concentration of prosodic exegesis, Baker’s narrative is of a piece,
and makes a cohesive statement about individual perception, paradoxically
unique while getting stuck in past resolutions. (Chowder obsesses over poets’
biographies, as well as their evaluative rankings.) The Anthologist is
an enjoyable novel, a delight to read aloud for its unaffected tone and its loopy insights. And again, who cares,
besides Guriel, that it misrepresents the actual poetry world? The character is
not supposed to be all-knowing. In fact, the point of his misreading of the
current scene, and that he’s not up to date on publications and journals other
than The New York Times, is that he’s a hidebound traditionalist not
just in verse but in life. Afraid of taking on new challenges, within a
relationship or on the job or in the community, his cluelessness about much
contemporary verse or different communities and schools can be understood in
this wider context. The uplifting ending is unconvincing, too easy, after that
entrenchment, but the compassionate tone of the novel makes it unsurprising.
Guriel wanted muck and fire. But that’s not the character, or the novel,
Nicholson wanted to create. And he didn’t need to. Others can fill in those blanks.
I don’t have a copy of
Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives at the moment, but, once again, I
take issue with Guriel’s view of the novel, to say nothing of his extraneous
assessments, though it’s less of an issue than was the case for Baker’s study.
Guriel praises the prose for “putting a lot of stock in the power of the good
old human voice at its least rehearsed and most conversational.” But the welter
of voices in the long, first-person, middle-section reportage, coagulate in an
amorphous jello of mediocre taste and texture. I get that poets, even good ones,
often flatline their speech with the best (or worst) of one’s
literary-despising or literary-indifferent acquaintances, but out of the
eighty?, a hundred?, different narrators, most all involved as poets, painters,
editors, publishers, curators, university students, journalists, one would
expect more than a few startling (there’s that word again) figures of speech,
similes, syntactical felicities, slang-slinging, cussing of originality and
cultural wit. (Guriel, with others, has attested to Natasha Wimmer’s excellent
translation, so that excuse is off the board.) Ironically, Guriel follows up
his previous quote with, “[f]ortunately, one can only imagine the purple
prose a Michael Ondaatje or Anne Michaels, presented with the same material,
would have slathered on”. But what’s wrong with using a Michaels-like voice to lampoon
pretensions of some of Bolano’s characters? It’d be entirely believable: young,
impressionable poets trying, through strained, overly-ambitious, high-flown
diction, to create a name for themselves in the crowded din of Mexican
poetastery. (Many of those young people talk with the same elevated
self-importance as they write.) Not Bolano’s aim, though, apparently. There’s
been much praise for Bolano for the humour in The Savage Detectives, but
the overwhelming emotional residue is one of sadness. A heavy, hopeless
sadness. Guriel notes the “underdog” nature of the visceral realists (as well
as their counterpart in Chowder), and he “got caught up in the sheer adventure”
of the realists’ quest to track and find the elusive Tinajero, a fantastically
obscure poet whose one extant poem the young dreamers have elevated into a
mythical document. I, unlike Guriel, don’t much care about poems or songs that
may or may not have existed, but I agree that the chase itself was fun. Well,
for at least a hundred pages. Now, I have to state – I often enjoy long novels.
Some of our greatest canonical works, of course, cross the 500 page-plus finish
line. But The Savage Detectives covers its terrain many times, then
backtracks, and (despite the change in locations) takes us on similar tours. Buried
underneath billowing exhaust and dust are some narrative gems, especially when
Bolano allows his storyteller(s) to breathe for more than three pages. Perhaps
Guriel got sidetracked, too, because he fills the middle of his review with
detours into the worlds of Joyce’s Dedalus and Nabokov’s John Shade.
Interesting comparisons to the core work, and Guriel’s insight is excellent –
“Dedalus and Madero [SD’s introductory and concluding narrator] share a
fantasy: they want to possess an oeuvre, without having to give much thought to
what it might consist of” – but the exclusive focus on the poet- theme leaves
out the many other concerns and obsessions of Bolano: the career-climbing
word-related professionals who manipulate language to their benefit; an enlightenment
fantasy of language that substitutes, ironically, for the beatific promises of
organized religion (well, maybe that ties in with Guriel’s consideration); the
traffic between words as charm, and sexual desire and decay; and the
disagreements, even violence, between wage-earners and their poetic parasites. Guriel’s
final line, as a faint damnation or faint approval of the two novels – “We’ve
had a lot of fictional poets who are easy to love; we need more who actually
deserve it” – is praiseworthy, but problematic. Are only successes worthy of
love? And how do we account for a successful artist in fiction? By popularity,
subjective evaluation (good luck with the narrative arc on that one), strength
of personality?
I’ve read other works
which are the focus of The Pigheaded Soul, but, as mentioned earlier,
have had to limit my selection in what I’ve engaged with above. It’s certainly
unrepresentative of my evaluative decision on the book as a whole. Guriel,
despite my earlier condemnation, shows a deft touch when burrowing, for three
pages, into one poem, “Play”, from Suzanne Buffam’s excellent 2005 Past
Imperfect, patiently triggering Buffam’s word choices and sonic manoeuvring
into the childrens’ psychology during the game. His fond and slight mocking of
the Griffin Prize extravaganza, in the role of cultural gadabout, is amusing
and occasionally noteworthy for its puncturing of subdued Canadian pomposity.
(Yes, I’m aware of the oxymoron, but the tag still fits.) And it’s heartening
to read about a little love shown once more for the Wordsworth-lite verse of
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman who, at least, gets the occasional nod decade to
decade from the academic set. Guriel’s most important attribute, however, is
his writing: concise, with creative turns of phrase, surprising and apt lexical
choices, skeptical, allusive, unstuffy and unafraid to stick his neck out with
evaluations (Heaney’s The Human Chain doesn’t make the grade), and
wide-ranging, Guriel is foremost a curious reader who’s arrogant enough to
believe his opinions matter (reviewers, in general, need more of that arrogance).
That I disagree with him on many of his assessments isn’t all that big a deal.
At least I know where the man stands. Can a reader of criticism ask for
anything more important?
