“Where there are many
beauties in a poem,
A few blots won’t offend,
those carelessly split,
Or that human frailty can
scarcely help. So what?”
-- Horace, “Ars Poetica”
Horace stuffed his
instruction in one long breezy poem. Jason Guriel, in last year’s Satisfying
Clicking Sound, believes in the verse equivalent of a Tim Vine joke – enter
straightaway, set up smartly, don’t leave them hanging – but he otherwise
approximates the seminal Latin work in focus, the meta- and meta-meta-brevity of
most every poem in the volume scored with the what-it’s-for and how-to
administration. Of course, other poets have treated readers as students – less
artfully, to be sure (and more on Guriel’s craft later, though here’s a hint,
it differs from the epigraph-leader) – but though that usually humourless
didactic strategy sees off more than a few “experimental” poetics-as-poetry
productions, there’s not much difference in the constant backgrounding of subject matter, in the
service of poetics, between Guriel’s in-poem foes or foils, and the author
himself.
Guriel’s ostensible
subjects include painters, speed bumps, leaves, straw, airport bookstores, and
signatures, but especially poets, musicians or songwriters, and geometry. Even
when Guriel forgets to organize his poetics mission for a page in “My Father’s
Stamps” – an anecdote about a dying father that necessarily shelves the
constant, bludgeoned-by-wit lit-crit allegory for a time-fading concentration
of emotion – the unwelcome switch is thrown back to an electrifying summation
of father-as-artist, in “this is the work of one/of the great surrealists”.
Guriel expresses often his exasperation with the poetic
process, and to a contemporary working poet, this must strike a lot of anvil
iron. But, as noted, the result is usually (always?) a foot or ten yards short
of ringing the bell. Should non-poets care, let alone sympathize? And if one
can enter the narrator’s anguished soul to commiserate with that failure during
one poem, does the next poem’s identical topic garner the same consideration? Of course,
Guriel would argue it’s all about craft. But aesthetic accomplishment
straightjacketted by its own abstract commentary can’t even be considered
stifling (another reviewer called this “claustrophobic”, and Guriel responds to
it in a clever but silly poem wherein the conceit has the unfortunate critic
shut up in an air-tight cartoon) because there isn’t much – and in many poems,
no – force to stifle. Subjects are hauled into Guriel’s ideé fixe by music
biography so that the epigraph (in part, “ “The hands playing haunting chords
turned into clenched fists pounding the ivories” “, from Ben Edmonds) serves as
the (by now) obvious spur to another link to the poetic process. And what does
Guriel do with this unexciting material?
“Hands playing haunting
chords
cannot help the soul
that’s up the sleeves,
and cannot help
but fall as fists – off
and on and off
the beat – upon the
ivories.”
Guriel adheres, in the following,
however, to more of Horace’s advice, knowingly or no: “You who write, choose a
subject that’s matched by/Your powers, consider deeply what your shoulders/Can
and cannot bear.” But that’s selling oneself very short here. The subject, dear
reader, is Dennis Wilson’s creative angst. Now, I confess I haven’t read the
bio this is taken from. Perhaps there’s a case to be made for buried genius in the
failures of the drummer. But, really, who cares other than diehard Beach Boys
fans or Dennis Wilson groupies? If Dennis wasn’t related to Brian, the only
audience for his mediocre drumming would have been several other drunks in a
seaside bar, and he would have been surfing to the welfare depot every month
after hosing crabs out of his trunks. Remember, this is a poem about the
frustrations of creativity.
Good, then, that Guriel
concentrates his idea on others more worthy of incorporating it, as well as
shedding light on the process. “Poetry Is Barbarous” takes off from a letter
from mentor Samuel Menashe, in which the poet writes of erasing lines that’s
he’s just sent. Guriel turns this into an arresting image of two rakes covered
by snow. I wonder if he meant for the rakes, originally, to be thought
of as clearance devices. Not a happy thought, that, to be sure, when
considering the religious or primordial aspects of creation. A pun
(surprise!) appears with the expected short development, though it works on two
levels (at least), and the scene ends with “the rakes are primered-over
lines/that lie below like old designs.” A satisfying click? Or piling on with
unnecessary metaphor? To get to that click ...
The book’s titular poem
uses an epigraph from a Steve Jobs bio wherein engineers were asked to “stay up
all night fiddling with the headphone jack so that it made a more satisfying
clicking sound”. Guriel then, in the poem proper, compares this to Yeats’ well-known
quote on “the click/of a well-made box”. As is Guriel’s frequent procedure, the
reader is led to consider possible sonic metaphors. The cricket’s “field/of
creaks” is an excellent sonic choice and lexical melisma (and the obligatory
pun is enjoyable, probably because here it’s buried – many of the other puns in
the book should have been read their last rites). I admit my own obtuseness
with the poem’s own final click. Actually, for Guriel, an extended one that I
can’t decipher. Images of death are introduced early on, and the abstract
summation uses them organically, but I don’t get the connection to Yeats or,
indeed, to the headphones’ click. A well-made ending is a definite death? The
poem’s “click” has to be finite in what way? Aesthetically? Dialectically?
Logically? “What’s grating/is the indefinitiveness/of the death rattle-/ragged,
the way/we have to guess/which one’s the last/gasp by waiting/out the
sequence.”
The three strongest poems
in Satisfying Clicking Sound are “The Washbasin”, “A Moving Picture”,
and “Looking at People While Listening to Nico”. In the former, the father is
recently deceased, and the narrator stares at his murky, shifting reflection in
a washbasin of water that his father hadn’t emptied. The subject, and its
metaphorical support, is finally intriguing. And Guriel delivers. Though Tom
Vine’s “quantity over quality” philosophy of punning allows no poem to go
unpunished, the main one here – “The reflection of my face/takes it on the
chin” – is legitimately startling. Even here, though, one wonders if the joke
was too irresistable, that another more emotionally affecting and logical
choice would have been better. Say, “in the heart” instead of “on the chin”. No pun there,
though. Better tamp down the emotion. Still, the poem recovers, and really
kicks off a wake with its concluding, “I mean to stand for one/more moment in
the five/o’clock shadow of/my father, a brave face/I pretend is mine.”
“A Moving Picture” is the
volume’s highlight, and a terrific meditation on perspective, yes, but there’s also
and finally a correspondingly light and weighty metaphysical element to the
poem top to bottom. “Once when I was one/year old and on my back,/I noticed the
sun/seemed skewered on a lance.” There’s no borrowed preface, here. No
straining for extended metaphor. The one is no longer the other. The one is
both the one and the other. (Most metaphors, no matter how craftily
drawn, fall down metaphysically, not structurally.) There’s a wonderfully
appropriate simile involving Icarus here that hovers successfully in the pre-
and post-period, both in mythological implication and in the autobiographical
timeline. I usually hesitate in quoting too much of a very good poem because
lines, out of context, can seem haphazard or confusing meshed with surrounding
exegesis. The rhymes here are frequently full, and all follow a sing-songy
ABAB, a fantastic and deceptive contrast to the perfectly orchestrated and
thoughtful material.
“Looking at People while
Listening to Nico” sees Guriel in the heads of actual people, not abstract
props that can more easily be shifted about a geometrical board, as in
“Problems of Design”. Here, “[T]he face across the aisle/yawns – but Nico
stops/the hole with a moan/of a voice the face,/a middle-aged man’s,/doesn’t
know it makes.” Similar in imaginary conception to the static “Claustrophobic”,
the transformation here is complicated by shifting emotions, in both the sender
and receiver. Guriel then ups the ante further down the typically quick-running
lines when, “[B]ut then/you’re not yourself/either in the eyes/of those whose
ears/are also spoken for.”
A poet who writes
criticism should be given even less leeway for compositions about composition.
After all, we’ve heard it before. And the prose, elsewhere, is good enough,
sometimes more than good enough.. There’s an enjoyable interview of guitarist
Rory Gallagher up on yootoob in which he answers questions on the technical
detail of playing any of various of his instruments. Gallagher circles his hands artfully around the
frets, the resonator, demonstrates with a few phrases, holds up a brass slide,
and casually throws off allusions and category shifts. But I’ve only seen that
ten or fifteen minute interview once. Mostly I’d rather listen to any one of
hundreds of his versions of “Tattooed Lady”.
