There is nowhere any apology for despondency. Always there is life—which, rightly lived, implies a divine satisfaction. I am soothed by the rain drop on the door sill—every globule that pitches thus confidently from the eaves to the ground, is my life insurance——Henry David Thoreau
Think of all the shit that insulates us from the real encounter. When Rimbaud writes I is another, I for one always figured he meant I is the imaginary. Your sense of self, my sense of self, it’s always imagined. Constructed. We can’t picture some objective reality any more than a photograph pictures what’s there, right? You know people in tribes that haven’t seen photographs, when they see one, even one that shows them their own face, they don’t always recognize the image. It’s miniature and flat and maybe black and white and it doesn’t have a smell, and the kick of being isn’t in it at all.Which, being speech-mimickry, doesn’t capture the entirely lush pleasures of Gander’s prose. I got hook’d immediately—in the opening paragraph—by the rhythmic nimbleness of the sentences, the changeable explanatory drive to “answer” the initial query, moving from the bark’d out “States away” to the nigh-sneery dawdling of the final sentence, running through its excuses, as if changing its own mind mid-stream:
And where is he, the biological father of the unborn child? States away. One a New Orleans tugboat in violent Gulf water. Nor will he make it so far up the river again, with five weeks’ pay and anaconda boots, looking for a lovely girl’s ear to nibble, and with half a notion, steadily declining, to betroth his charismatic loathsomeness to whatever sad someone might part her lips for him, take in his torrent of lies, and mistake him for whatever he surely is not.Truth is, the character Les—Frank Stanford stand-in or not—is a terrific piece of work, a complicated divergent bundle, a fascinator. Somewhere Sarah says, and it’s not clear if she’s longing for the everyday to dull the pain of loss, or repeating a thing Les (whose tremendous capacity for all things) said: “If only routine would brush sensation aside.” And Gander’s book is that sort of thing: I read it in a gulp, one sitting. It is prose pump’d up to a high pitch with no release—a gusto-prose, and Les-fitting:
His face was so weighted down by its brooding handsomeness that he seemed older and more convincing than the rest of us. His gravitas sucked us in. He could lock his eyes on you and draw you toward an alien realm where you were given to suspend you habits of thought. It was as if he’d come from a place where excitement wasn’t taken to be a reverse indicator of intelligence and where it was normal to mention Cocteau and blue-channel catfish in the same sentence. None of us had his range, none of us had read so much. The opal blackness of his eyes was magnetic.
When he was left alone, when he had pulled out one stop after another (for the work required it), Stanley straightened himself on the seat, tightened the knot of the red necktie, and struck. The music soared around him, from the corner of his eye he caught the glitter of his wrist watch, and even as he read the music before him, and saw his thumb and last finger dome down time after time with three black keys between them, wringing out fourths, the work he had copied coming over on the Conte di Brescia, wringing that chord of the devil’s interval from the full length of the thirty-foot bass pipes, he did not stop. The walls quivered, still he did not hesitate, Everything moved, and even falling, soared in atonement.(That “even falling, soared in atonement” cranks up the mysterious Frank O’Hara line writ in the notebook he carry’d into the Fire Island vehicle’s path: “He falls; but even in falling he is higher than those who fly into the ordinary sun.”) And isn’t that Gaddis himself, “caught in the collapse,” the way any work finally comes down around the head of its maker? And, because it is rather sourly funny, (isn’t it, too) a gentle prod into the ribs of those who’d see great paroxysms of heroics in art, the (model being the Poundian) work left unfinish’d (“unfinishable”) at death, what a laughably paltry achievement, that? “The devil's interval” refers to “the tritone, the interval of the augmented fourth”; in Steven Moore’s excellent guide (with annotations) to The Recognitions it is noted: “Its use was prohibited by early theorists.”
He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.
Regular readers of the New York Daily News, the Continental Daily Mail, and France-Soir, may feel the sudden blurt of familiarity with (certain) situations that arise in the following pages . . .So reads the draft, ditch’d. Bolañoesqueries again. The low trumping the high. And today, what one reads (for highbrow “sport”—it “distills the world media’s discharge”) in Harper’s “Weekly Review” (“British researchers found that obesity may be socially contagious, a council in London banned the placing of foster children in households with smokers, and 700 couples were married in a mass wedding in the Eurasian separatist territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Scientists in Japan produced clones of dead mice, a feat they say brings them closer to resurrecting extinct species, and author Michael Crichton died. Spanish authorities deported one of Osama bin Laden’s sons after denying his asylum application, monks brawled at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Christ was crucified and buried, and Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of the destruction of parts of an ancient Muslim cemetery, where some of Saladin’s warriors are buried, to make way for a new Frank Gehry-designed $250 million Museum of Tolerance.”) is pre-echo’d in some of Gaddis:
On the other hand, readers unfamiliar with the above or similar periodicals—or those who read nothing but market reports, the sports pages, and the news ‘that’s fit to print’—may credit me with an (imagination ) of infernal consequence: suffice it to say that no single (imagination) is completely aberant [sic] to concieve [sic] of the abundance of phantastical (horror) which exists on all sides today as reality. But these are the people who find (horror) only in fiction, which they consider a waste of their time and the time of the lunatic who set it down; while they accept the (remediable) disaster around them with indifference . . .
The thirty-third person leaped from the Eiffel Tower (though unofficial figures had it nearer a hundred), this time from the 348-foot second platform, and after a twenty-year investigation the Friends of Cleopatra found that the remains in her grave, in the library garden of the Louvre, were not that queen at all, but the body of an Arab soldier killed in a Paris café brawl, and the mummy, looking like a tight bundle of rags, gone to a mass grave eighty years before, and all joy of the worm. . . .Etc. Reminds me, too, of a lecture by Isabel Allende claiming (with numerous press citations) that the much-vaunt’d “magical realism” of the Boum “merely” reflect’d the everyday “real.”
In San Francisco, seven strands of barbed wire were strung at the jumping-off place on the Golden Gate Bridge, which one hundred and fifty people had chosen as a point of departure from this world since the bridge was opened in 1937.
In Moscow, Pravda announced that Hawaiian guitar music had been banned in Russia.
. . . Three hundred lepers were reported marching on the capital city of Columbia from their colony at Rio Agua de Dios. Nine Pilgrims were trampled to death, and twenty-five injured, jamming the gates of the Shrine of Chalma in Mexico. A Baptist minister in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, burned two copies of the new revised version of the Bible because it substituted the words young woman for virgin, and a Lutheran minister said they were both wrong: the word should be maiden. In Chicago there was a crime every 12.5 minutes. Some chickens exploded in a town near Hanover, Germany (they had eaten carbide dropped by British troops on maneuver and drunk water).
The last of Summer is Delight—Why, I do not know.
Deterred by Retrospect.
’Tis Ecstasy’s revealed Review—
Enchantment’s Syndicate.
To meet it—nameless as it is—
Without celestial Mail—
Audacious as without a knock
To walk within the Vail.
For sale: anarchy for the masses; irrepressible satisfaction for superior amateurs; atrocious deaths for disciples and lovers!Which sent me off to re-read Spicer’s “A Fake Novel about the Life of Arthur Rimbaud,” looking for what exactly? Frankly, the thing is a mess—vacillating between crabbed surrealistic flourishes that bump against the ground, too-ballast’d (“Apollinaire used to play golf while other people were shooting machine guns. Big butterflies tried to liberate him from the liberal mineded. But Rimbaud crawled to the page that lifted him up from his nephews.”) and obscure homiletics (“‘Surrealism is a coat of many colors,’ Rimbaud is supposed to have remarked long after everything was over. To love is not to continue with the Zanzibar slave trade. To continue with the Zanzibar slave trade is not to love. It is similar.”) (The alcoholic in Spicer is both obsessively reiterative (“the tiresome drunk”) and always going off somewhere else, hard to “follow” (“the ‘incoherent’ drunk”). Try tracing the local meanings of “the Dead Letter Office” through Spicer’s novel of Rimbaud—of course it’s full of inconsistencies. (As Spicer says in Chapter I of Book III, “An Ontological Proof Of The Existence Of Rimbaud”: “This is called Occam’s Law or Davy Jones’ Locker. // If they call him up into being by their logic he does not exist.” Which is not unlike Escoffier’s maxim “Faites simple”—“Keep it simple,” ratiocinatory mayhem (“Reason”)’s got no truck in matters of faith.) That’s Spicer the “blind” drunk. (Akin to, of course, O’Hara’s “You just go on your nerve.” And to Rimbaud’s “un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens,” inexplicitly, and with a pull’d punch—that “raisonné”—a call for “faith.”) On some level though, the Dead Letter Office is simply a “blank check,” useless as currency (though, too, of huge use in an economy of faith, where fraudulence rests within), tabula rasa to a ghostly legion (a “host”) of poets. Spicer’s Chapter II of Book III, titled “The Dead Letter Office”:
For sale: habitations and migrations, sports, spectaculars and perfect comforts, and the noise, the movement and the future they make!
For sale: arithmetical applications and the unheard-of harmonic leaps. Unsuspected discoveries and terms—immediate possession.
. . .
For sale: bodies, voices, the immense unquestionable opulence, things that will never be sold . . .
Sentiment is not to the point. A dead letter is there because it has no longer real addresses.James Buchanan, 1791-1868; Cordell Hull, 1871-1955. And somewhere in the dingy corridors of the brainbox, I recall Bill Bathurst’s heart-breaking “How to Continue” that I put down here at Hotel Point, that big red structure unfading. Is Bathurst echoing Spicer in its defiant opening lines? “Don’t sell anything inside yourself for money or whatever it controls; remember legal tender only affords temporal control of material goods & treat it like dogshit you scrape off your shoe . . .” Which recalls Rimbaud’s lines in “Nocturne vulgaire”:
If President Buchanan sent a letter to Cordell Hull (also dead) it would remain there. No thanks to the spirit of things. A dead letter is exactly as if someone received it.
What Rimbaud knew or someone else knew is no incidental. Sentiment is not to the point. These dead poets knew what was coming to them.
There was a blank book where the ghosts or the ages of them kept listening. Or what the others said. As in the gold in an earring.
A blank check.
Or what the others said. President Buchanan pledged his truth when he died.
—Et nous envoyer, fouettés à travers les eaux clapotantes et les boissons répandues, rouler sur l’aboi des dogues . . .Which recalls “poetry—a machine to catch ghosts.”
—Un souffle disperse les limites du foyer.
—And, whipped through the splashing of waters and spilled drinks, send us rolling around on the barking of dogs . . .
—One breath blows away the boundaries of the hearth.
We who struggle to create fictions of various sorts, and with varying success, must regard the state with awe, for the state itself may be the grandest fiction to be concocted by man, barring only one.Present’d, as the state itself would claim, as a “public service announcement.” Recalling a “truth” I found myself in command of some few years back whilst hitchhiking in northern Michigan: “I lied to everybody and they liked it.” Or, one is remind’d of a tiny line quoted in Peter Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason. Label’d “testament of an aristocrat,” it serves to guy up the state’s grim fatuity and fool’s beneficence (particularly in post-bailout U. S. terms): Je n’ai rien, je dois beaucoup, / je donne le reste aux pauvres. (I have nothing, I have many debts, / I give the rest to the poor.)
The collision course on which we as writers frequently find ourselves with this Leviathan lies in the efforts of the state to preserve and protect its own imagined version of itself, confronted by the writer’s individual imagined version of what the state—what life in the state, that is to say—could and should, or at least should not be.
Thus much of our fiction, going back well over a century, has been increasingly fueled by outrage or, at the least, by indignation. Curiously enough, this is often coupled with and even springs from the writer’s perennially naïve notion that through calling attention to inequities and abuses, hypocrisies and patent frauds, self-deceiving attitudes and self-defeating policies, these will be promptly corrected by a grateful public; but the state is the public’s fiction, and gratitude is not its most prominent attribute.
In our work we are all familiar, overly familiar, with that injunction regarding the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader, and here the great irony emerges: The more ingeniously, the more humanly and even the more comically, especially in the exaggeration of satire, we attempt to embrace reality—you might even say truth—the more vigorous the efforts of the state to flee from reality in fictions of such magnitude and audacity that we are swamped in admiration and dismay.
The most sweeping feat of the human imagination dwarfing even that of the state itself, where the state historically seeks refuge and in fact may well have been born, is that invisible realm of revealed wisdom, revealed truths, divine revelations. Expressed in extremes ranging from passive resistance to indiscriminate murder, this phenomenon overwhelms us today in all sorts of national regalia, speaking in tongues of every register, under the common name Fundamentalism. It is often hailed in laudatory terms of a religious awakening. It often, recalling its bloody forebears in the late Middle Ages, presents itself as a crusade.
There is no end to its variety . . .
& his—letters from the plantThat stagger’d list provides a sense of predecessor and heritage: one ought rightfully add: Paul Metcalf’s stripped-down historickal particulars (become mythic), Lorine Niedecker’s terse laconic detail, Basil Bunting’s chisel, and (in counter-current, thrusting against the tendency) a boisterous willingness to include all (“to speak in other words”), to collect and witness the roiling turbulence of what water gathers to itself, how “the river comes to mean / outside nets cast wide / beneath spanning bridges / the river comes to mean // —in other words.” Or the words of others. The sheer range of material is audacious enough—a fluvial mimickry at work bringing together tributary detritus (contributor and tribute there in the shallows). As Owens puts it amidst a bare-knuckled story about one Boney Quillen—“Rafter songster prankster”—who’s seen “running at times / shouting ahead ‘Cut ’er loose, boys’” (the shout a kind of commandment for the Memoranda’s poetic strategy):
covered in gear grease & soluble oil
arrive with books my mother
patiently pulled from bedroom shelves
—Whitman & Williams
Crane & Pound.
Think again through early models
behaviors shaped by—
church fathers inscribed in flesh
exhausted—not possibilities
but the mind handling these materials
not to know but announceThere is, in the river’s flotsam and jetsam, its sweepings and leavings: reports of bar talk (at the Tom Quick in Milford, Pa., Charles Peirce and forester Gifford Pinchot territory); lines out of the old sea shanty call’d “The Golden Vanity” (descend’d out of a Child ballad—“He swam upon the ship / & he beat upon the side / crying Captain pick me up / for I’m weary with the tide”); remarks by the eighteenth century Quaker Richard Smith on “Manners and Customs of the Indians” (“They know Nothing yet of Hours or Miles but point to the Sun as to say they will perform such a Journey by that Time the Sun is in such a Position counting their Fingers for Days and using notched sticks for Almanacs . . .”); lines out of an obituary (in The Narrowsburg Democrat) for one river guide and “cave dweller Coxie Blivens, b. 1862–d . 1912” (“He eked out a meagre existence working around the village and for the past two years had lived in a cave across the river from Narrowsburg. It was hardly a cave but simply an over-hanging rock with a few boards as a shelter.”); some patches of “stark mad” lingual strutting mestizo compost talk (“nae sayin’ molestiae consequatur / occupé d’un problème’ / earfeþa gemyndig”); imperial etymologies (the “murderous endorsement” of a name: “Delaware. Third Earl de la Warr. / Title like any other—Peerage / of Great Britain”); letters—“John Adams to Abigail—May 1, 1777” (that is, “King Tammany’s Day,” Adams writing of Tamanend, one of the chiefs of the Lenni-Lenape, who, old, blind, forsook, “made him up a large Fire and threw himself into it.”); a piece of John Darnall’s “outline” for the Charter of Pennsylvania, wherein, under a Greek alphabetical listing, he details all the natural assets of the land and waters he believes William Penn ought gain control (“α. Lakes. rivulets / streams:”); signage (“TRENTON MAKES / THE WORLD TAKES”): and some terribly moving letters address’d “Dear Ric” and apparently written some few years back by Owens’s father “working abroad,” union labor for Reynolds Metals (“I am on nights again. Seems like this is the best time to write you. Emmett has stated working. He seems to be doing alright. He is working on the palletizers. He already had one accident. He caught his hand in the end fence when it comes out to pack the cans. The chipboard was folded up in the back. He put his hand in the back of it, hit the button and the end fence went back and caught his hand. He cut his fingers pretty good, but now he will learn not to put his hand in back of anything that comes out because it has to go back.”) Too, some reproductions, union letterhead paper. Throughout: nudges to how it all relates to the present predicaments:
in the measure between words
that which is otherwise lost
in the dance of exchange.
& today the boiler brokenThat put down next to (“Caritas & agency ensnared”)some lines pointing to an historical spasm of justifiable rage:
flooding the basement—
socks wet from snow
shoveling away what the city left behind
split wood
for fear of the cost of crude
levels rising
through moments of interminable conflict.
& the following winter Cpt. DevriesThere’s something supple, all-including, and, most rare, highly moral about Owens’s work here in Delaware Memoranda: unhesitant witness he is, turning up the river’s sluice and item with measure and respect, all the while refusing to make a bright something where there is nothing: “Not to fetishize the fucking river / but to think through the transformation / —how we come—to be to mean / encountering others along the banks.”
finds uncultivated fields
strewn with the dry bones of settlers
encounters Theunis Willemsen
sole surviving witness of Lenape rage.
Settlement devastated
on beheading sachem
falsely accused of stealing.
J. Danforth Quayle, that dangling initial tells the story: the pompous self-importance of your small-town banker who forecloses the farm, your Gulf War general with the $5 million advance whose selective chronicle of slaughter is being written by someone else; J. Danforth Quayle, the acolyte of the reigning prince of hypocrites (two patrician middle initials this time): J. Danforth Quayle, who has in fact got principles of his own, derived from an abiding confusion of an elitism based on merit with a midwestern country-club version embracing the empty privileges of unearned money; and who is not the public joke so frequently portrayed but rather, in being smart rather than intelligent, using the vested interests that are using him, could, if allowed by a skipped heartbeat or a dazed electorate, emerge as quite a dangerous fellow.
Do you know what it was? What it really was? that everything was so afraid, so uncertain God saw it, that it insisted on its vanity in His eyes? Fear, fear, pessimism and fear and depression everywhere, the way it is today, that’s why your pictures are so cluttered with detail, this terror of emptiness, this absolute terror of space. Because maybe God isn’t watching. Maybe he doesn’t see. . . . Separation . . . all of it cluttered with separation, everything in its own vain shell, everything separate, withdrawn from everything else. Being looked at by God! Is there separation in God?I like that “upside-down apology”—how it predicts some of David Hockney’s arguments, in Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, that optically-assisted painting, using combinations of the camera obscura, the camera lucida, and mirrors (a concave mirror’s got the optical quality of a lens and is capable of projecting an image—upside down—onto a flat surface) begins in the early fifteenth century in “the Low Countries.” Hence the era’s “rich & strange” sea-change in verisimilitude.
In the daylight’s embrace, objects reared to assert their separate identities, as the rising sun rescued villages from the throbbing harmony of night, and laid the world out where they could get their hands on it to assail it once more on reasonable terms. Shapes recovered proper distance from one another, becoming distinct in color and extension, withdrawn and self-sufficient, each an entity because it was not, and with daylight could not be confused with, or be a part of, anything else. Eyes were opened, things looked at, and, in short, propriety was restored.
“Catholics have sex more often than other Americans,” Father Greeley persists, ever divisive, and “are more playful in their erotic amusements than others.” The Decameron bears him out in many of its tales: a woman is tricked by an imposter priest into believing that he is the angel Gabriel and has fallen in love with her; after solacing himself with her, he escapes in a cloud of feathers, leaving his wings behind; elsewhere, an abbess surprised in delicto pulls the errant priest’s pants over her head, mistaking them in the dark for her cowl. Then there is the story of the nuns who coax a youth feigning mutism to service the entire convent—till one hot day the abbess finds him stretched out, apparently asleep. But “the wind lifting the forepart of his clothes,” she discovers his attraction and seizes upon him for herself.I truck not with religion one way or another, but foibles and faults and the idiocy of claimants I love. What I’m wow’d by about Gaddis is the extent he’ll stretch looking at (the sides of) a thing. Critics of The Recognitions got they cowls in a twist about it all. See Jack Green’s (a pseudonym) legendary book Fire the Bastards! It collects pieces originally print’d (1962) in a mimeograph’d magazine call’d newspaper, a one-man sheet, pieces that damn’d the poverty of The Recognitions’s initial reception. (Though, amazingly, the book received something like fifty-five reviews.) (Mostly all saying the same thing.) On the books “erudition” (as collect’d, stylishly lower-cased, by Green):
an encyclopedia is not a work of art. (berger)The final quote: Harvey Swados in The Hudson Review, again. The others: John Berger in The Nation, Frances Burnette in The Baltimore Sun, George Dixon in The Pittsburgh Press, Charles J. Rolo in The Atlantic Monthly, Durwood Mcalister in The Atlanta Journal & Constitution, Edward A. Laycock in The Boston Globe, Edward Wagenknecht in The Chicago Tribune, Walter O’Hearn in The Montreal Star, Dawn Powell in The New York Post, and Milton R. Bass in The Berkshire Eagle. All circa 1955, on the book’s—Gaddis’s first—publication.
Unfortunately, into its 956 pages the author has apparently tried to cram everything he knows (burnette)
the polysyllables, sentence fragments and foreign words give the novel too “arty” a tone. (dixon)
. . .
excessive deployment of the author’s phenomenal erudition (rolo)
too frequently obscured by unnecessary erudition. (mcalister)
repetitious parade of erudition (laycock)
. . .
Somebody arrives in Paris, and we get the whole background of Paris history before we go on with it. (wagenknecht)
Wyatt Gwyon and Wyatt’s creator, whose combined erudition is as annoying as Philo Vance’s (o’hearn)
a hail of erudition poured like boiling oil on the defenseless heads not of his enemies but of his readers (or does he intend an identity?).
It is precisely this last question which makes us uneasy: is it just the others whom he is assaulting, or is he after us too? (swados)
. . .
The reader scampering to catch the ever-defaulting hero in his many guises through bordellos and monasteries is exasperated by Author Gaddis, as Ancient Mariner, waylaying him with lectures on the Church Fathers, the Antichrist, Descartes or the “Book of the Dead.” (powell)
. . .
a writer of showy if spotty erudition and a determination to exploit it (o’hearn)
a wealth of religious reference which, meaningful as it may be to the expert, too often seems like so much theological name dropping. (newsweek)
[A list of books] may let you know that old Gaddis is a whiz with the reference cards in the library, but it adds very little to the novel in information about characters or insight into events. (bass)
. . .
as we press on through Mr. Gaddis’s heavy artillery fire (I counted eight different languages en route and there may well have been more), we begin to suspect that his contempt may extend to all those who know less than he.
Language in its settled form is the record of men’s second thoughts; a more faithful utterance than they can momentarily give. What men say is so sifted and obliged to approve itself as answering to a common want, that nothing absolutely frivolous obtains currency in the language. The analogies of words are never whimsical and meaningless, but stand for real likenesses— Only the ethics of mankind, and not of any particular man give point and vigor to our speech.Which reminds me (particularly the final sentence) a little of V. N. Vološinov’s ever-flowing “stream of speech” in opposition to random individual utterance. Isn’t there, too, a sense of the difference between “what men say” (“answering to a common want,” that is, with a limit’d semantic currency) and writing (“Language in its settled form”), wherein a word’s allow’d to “stretch” in all its, oh “furriness” (“shaggy and ecstatic” as Ronald Johnson says)? The danger: thinking one ought “control” the meanings, or simply be caught in the malarkey that they’ll never change. Too, late, reading well into William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (surely a “shaggy and ecstatic” thing if there ever were)—and built to an immoderate degree out of pure human speech—reading of the poet (he is legion, even “today”) who disavows that language itself thrives in such extravagance and erring:
And they passed under the eyes of the Paleolithic poet, glittering open from features whose prehistoric simplicity was faintly shadowed with apprehension at the sight of the opportune mutations going on around him, denying, by their very existence, the finality of his old-world wisdom, and suggesting, as they took to the air manipulating the baubles so helplessly evolved with a pretense of having designed them themselves, that perhaps, for all his belligerent cooperation with environment, that environment itself was changing, and not only he, but the entire species upon which he depended while living, and rescue from anonymity, perpetuation afterward, was to become part of the sodden floor, and the mat, and finally only traces on the crust itself.My druthers in the convention of the “Paleolithic poet” routine, the creeping onslaught of Procrustean conformity and sour conservatism amongst the “post avant” “set” (or any other): to recall (continuously) the dictum of Oscar Wilde: “To get back to one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.”
Tyger, tyger, says DickheadReplete with obligatory literary nod (just like Warner Bros.—who’d forget the building demolition company named “Edifice Wrecks” in some old Bugs Bunny cartoon?), though, here, rather inert.
which he always says when he gets another idea:
cling wrap, smart bomb, mechanical bull,
and because he’s half god, half cartoon,
Fuckhead keeps blowing himself up and putting
himself back together wrong . . .
Fatally, the boy picks up a what he thought“A lie begins to wither.” I don’t trust “Triage”—I don’t trust its ratatoille’d syntactical mush at the beginning; I don’t trust the clarity “un- / frozen” of its conclusion. Nor its aimless talk of “fitting through.” First its “two quick notes” of “birdsong” and, somewhat later, “poems, hidden in [a man’s] breath.” Splendid: truth’ll out, &c., &c. Except: what’s the “Check trickling through / the mail” doing there? (Unwitting sign of one’s most basic concern?) Is that a “fitting through”? Is there a triage evident here, a sorting according to degrees of urgency, of who or what’s salvageable? The details range from the perverse (“a room with a chocolate on the pillow”) to the confusing (“Time fitting through”) to the incoherent (“‘She’d be your age by now.’”) The upshot is that “Triage” seems a mere topical exercise, or, more cynically, a kind of poetic résumé-builder, some sign of Young’s tackling the big subjects. (I say that largely because of the paucity of such address elsewhere.)
on the occupier / insurgent fractioned
road. Fatally, the man goes out for popsicles
in the storm not for himself for his two
days later from the mudslide pulled he’s
given a kind of super power, drive a nail
into his chest he won’t care or notice.
The deluge greens the hills, the world
is full of wailing, concussions, unnerved
stillness, hushed discussion, then more
wailing but a birdsong still fits through
two quick notes sailing then what to do
how what needs stopping stop, speed what
needs now not? Check trickling through
the mail, joining an envelope-gush fed
into a machine that slits them open
counting. Groups of same-thinkers praying
which seems okay unless you study history
where such behavior’s often preparatory
to raving, attack, more slaughter. Somehow
a bicyclist fits through, bell on handlebars.
Then mother comes home, syntax stays intact,
a lie begins to wither. The man can’t fit
through barbed wire but his poems do, hidden
in his breath. Laughter fitting through at first
seems monstrous. “She’d be your age by now.”
Time fitting through a fruit tree, an owl.
A string quartet of kids, a room with a
chocolate on the pillow. Outside, an un-
frozen river for those still alive.
You can’t understand how everyone elseAnd goes through sentimental narratives (“You leave a gasp on the hotel pillow”) and canned jokes (“your fundamental experience was a hybrid / of boredom and dread you wouldn’t get / to the bathroom on time”) and bonhomie’d asides to the knowing reader (“If only you had one of those penlights / that’s also a penknife”) to end with:
walks around in flames, how they get through
the vapor locks, the persistent mazes
and partitions between you and the flowers
and the ideals and sprays of life
and goodness exhibits.
It feels like there’s a gray box on your head.
It is your head.
Boxhead.
Right now the only place air gets inRemarkable enough lines, and completely unwarrant’d, a ditzy gratuity to lift the poem out of its slog.
is where your mother kissed your head
when it was still soft as mucilage,
and she still a shiny dragonfly.
