3 Books

St John the Evangelist, Schenectady, New York (30 June 2012)
While walking many miles through the small city of Schenectady the day before yesterday, I stopped for the first time in the small bookstore run by the Friends of the Library group of the Schenectady County Public Library. I had never believed the store would carry anything of interest, but within a couple of minutes of entering its doors I ran across a copy of Anne Carson's An Oresteia, translations of three Greek plays by three separate dramatists. Being an avid reader of Carson, I picked up that book. (This was, very strangely, the second book I had bought in the course of a few days that had Oresteia as most of its title. The other was a translation of Aeschylus' Oresteia by Ted Hughes.) As I continued my search, I found a copy of William Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, which I have often meant to read and which slips into my current phase of reading memoirs, so I picked that up as well. And, finally, I ended with a surprise, an unexpectation, a book that made maybe I had less obvious reason to pick up, but I did: the second printing of the eighth edition of Arthur Rose-Innes' Beginners' Dictionary of Chinese-Japanese Characters and Compounds, from which I thought I could gather insight and enough crassly assembled knowledge to create visual poems that used Chinese characters meaningfully. The total cost for the books was $2.16, but I told the elderly woman who was the cashier to keep the change. She was amazed at my generosity, but I explained, "At $1 a book, I think I can manage."

But, of course this was inevitable, these are not the three books I plan to write about today. Instead, I want to write about three books of poetry I read on the same day almost two weeks ago. I rode busses (apologies, but I can't accept the American spelling in this case) three times that day, and I read each book during a separate bus ride. My interest is almost not at all in the books themselves, though, but in my reaction to them, and thus about our reactions to books and how they can be both well reasoned and spurious at the same time. I'm interested in how the concept of quality accrues and grows in the fashion of coral, holding fast to some base belief, but extending out to encompass anything within the reach of that belief.


Book 1: Rachel Loden's Dick of the Dead

From the title on, this book is a joy of wordly imagination. Swirling around the pathological post-Quaker self who was President Richard (AKA Dick, AKA Tricky Dick) Nixon, the title puns against the collocation "the quick and the dead," for Nixon now continues as a person wholly dead but a personage and personality that cannot sift itself out of the imagination. A man of great intelligence and drive, he became a beast driven by his darkest self, paranoid, haunted, it seems, from the sense (whether true or not) that shenanigans with the voting in Chicago in 1960 cost him the presidential election, and even becoming president did not erase the scar of that November night when my mother herself took me, only five months old at the time, into the voting booth to vote for his opponent, a man named Kennedy).

But I've drifted of the plane of the book itself here, even as I refer, in fragmented and refracting ways, onto stories and symptoms that inhabit this book. But maybe it's not that I like about the book, maybe it isn't even the poems themselves. Maybe it is the fact that the book has a tinge of Finland in it. Finland, my faraway and neverwas home. The book opens with a dedication to two people, one (Jussi) bearing a Finnish name, and occasionally a poem somehow identifies itself with Finland, even if in passing. Finland, maybe the only country in the world with a name in English that begins with a letter, a sound, not native to its native language. To me it is Suomi. Postage stamps have always shown me the way.

The book rebounds off the events of Nixon's reign in the United States. Nixon Rex. Tyrannosaurus Nix. A man vilified at the end of his term, the only president to resign from office, but one somehow reborn after opening his memoirs—a book that seemed to claim to be about nurses—that he was born in the house his father built. And this book of Loden's in filled with such references, not these, but similar ones—sometimes obscure references to strange sentences spoken by or in the presence of Nixon and sometimes recorded on tape that wound and wound through the conversations of a presidency.

Still, you know nothing of the poems from me. I've kept them secret. I am merely hoisted into the seat to fly this airplane of words by the force of Loden's own words, the magic of her manner, how the words are neat and pleasant, beautiful yet raucous, given to great bursts of imagination, and stunning in their drive. (Nearly meaningless, I realize that. But it is not a description of the words that reviews a book; it is a description of the feeling of the words in a body that is.)

And I feel these words and their imagination. Loden's general style is long-lined couplets enjambing like a car going 75 when the driver simultaneously slams on the brakes and swerves the steering wheel counter-clockwise to return to where she's come. We are thrown akilter by Loden's words, her mastery, her mistressery, of the language, how she is erudite and palpably of the hoi polloi all at once, alive with history and with the culture of the Popinstan culture that rains through the holes in our umbrellas, even on sunny days. So a poem about S.C.U.M. Manifestoist Valerie Solanas, the sculptress with a knife into the white white chest of Andy Warhol until Frankensteinian stitches puckered it almost into a vortex that could suck us back into his empty bloodless heart, faces a poem that is a rewrite, homage, and parody of Robert Creeley's most famous poem, ending here with

floor it, he sd, for
christ's sake, 4.9
seconds to 60 mph.

You can almost hear Loden torquing that steering column.


Book 2: John Allen Cann's Solitude in the Shape of a Woman

Give me a canon, and I ask for something else. I do not want to kill anyone with the accepted, the sanctioned (a word, I note, that can turn on itself), the tried and tired. Sure, I might like those canons, and might even polish into some other poem a few words raised off the surface of its barrel. But I don't just want a canon; I always require something else. The surprise, the hated, even the unknown. Because of this, I buy books of poetry by people I've never heard of if something about the book catches my interest. It may be the description of the poems, but never the blurbs. Those blurbs don't move me, something that pains me, because it seems possible that blurbing may be my true calling, that I cannot write poems so well as I can write pithily and forcefully about them. Alas, so true. Sometimes it might be the design of the book that catches my eye.

In the case of John Allen Cann's Solitude in the Shape of a Woman, which I picked up at Powell's in Portland, Oregon, it was the production values of this little book. Twice as wide as it is long, the book was handset, the title an author's name pressed deeply, and in silver foil, into the blue cover becoming dingy, and illustrated with a muscular little asemic sequence of three black brush strokes, the face of the book itself demands attention. And inside the pages are of heavy paper the color of French vanilla, the titles of each of the thirty-three tercets flush left and in small capitals, and the three lines of each poem set farther from the gutter and reaching languidly across the page, most of the lines carrying a breath or breath and a half of words that urges a reader to reach for the right edge of the page, and at least one line so long that it must be cut in two and its remain inset even further to the right having broken past the invisible barrier of the margin.

The poems, I fear, are a little maudlin, but human for that fault, and they tell the story of a love found and then lost—the order of those modifiers of "love" not right for the soul. The book even opens with an epigraph, stolen from a discarded poem of Cann's, that testifies to a pain in continuance: "For The Woman Who Comes To Fill This Solitude" (capitalization as in the original). As short as the poems are, they still manage enough space for euphuism and a little empurpling. Even I might have avoided a phrase as romantic as "a windswept sapphire sky," even as I would have struggled to insist a hyphen not in existence ("winds-wept") to make the weepiness even more unbearable. And the poet's ending inscription to a friend of his

Kathy,
       That the Logos may fill us
                     with Light.
                                          your friend,
                                                 John
                                                        Christmas '87

made me wonder if Kathy were the solitude of the poem, a solitude I thought less truly that than a loneliness, but the word "loneliness" would be impossible since it wouldn't have been poetic enough.

Still, the poems showed a man of reading and a man running through the stations of his pain, someone trying to paint a reality but a little too reluctant to use the blood that would be necessary to make these right. Still, I thought the poems too weak, the poet too given over to words almost archaic. Still, the poems somehow still hurt me, maybe because their flailings demonstrated a real hurt, a humanness, and a human attempt to voice the self, to leave the self behind, impressed into the rich deep fibers of the page.

I allowed the poet a little misericord suffused with a dream of frankincense and the single clinking of the thurible. In genuflection with rise or fall.



Book 3: Robert Creeley & Archie Rand's Drawn & Quartered

Why did I pick up this book, also at Powell's? Was it because it was by Creeley? Not exactly, but the fact that these poems are not, so far as I recall, in the two volumes of his collected poems meant that I would not have read them? Was it because it was a volume by Granary Books? No. I might enjoy some books by Granary, but, more often than not, the hype of their books overwhelms the hypodermic pump of the books themselves into my veins. To a great degree, it was because this book was a verbo-visual affair.

Archie Rand is an artist whose "humor, quickness, and lack of pretension much attracted" Creeley, and Creeley ended up writing fifty-four poems in one night, each one written against the example of an Archie Rand drawing. That seems an endeavor to my liking: image and writing, writing serving as textual illustration to the pre-existing drawing, a mien almost like a one-panel comic, and a forced servitude that required Creeley to perform the poems, to write them freely and extemporaneously onto the same page as the respective drawing, to write as a form of performance. These are essentially the basic tenets of the major kinds of writing I do.

And yet. Well. And yet. I simply hated this book.

I have almost never hated a book of poetry as much as I hated this one. Hate. It's a strong word. I used it relatively infrequently. Rand's drawings were muddy in their reproduction and artless in their movements. Certainly, he has a style that is slightly cartoonish, but in a scrawl that he then muddles with watercolor or a wash of ink. The artlessness of his work is meant to be the art, but many of these images devolved into dark vortices without contour, into black holes of humorlessness.

Yet the pictures are the best part of the book.

This is fairly late Creeley: 2001. So maybe he created the poems in 2000. Creeley had already descended into his rhyming phase, a black miasma he could not manage to extricate himself from. The man had no ear for rhyme. As a matter of fact, let's admit it, what made him great, when he was great, and he often was, was when his ear seemed to lead him astray. The jaggedness of his lines, the curt pirouettes, were a kind of stumble, and that stumbling voice, something we heard as a whispered staccato, was the magic of Creeley, so maybe it was earlessness that made his poems great.

But keep the man away from rhyme. At their worst, and most of them are, these poems are little more than bastardized clerihews. Not even thoroughbred clerihews. Let's take a poem chosen at random:

For years I'd thought
such bliss as this could not be bought.
While I waited,
my desire itself abated.

If that doesn't sound like a clerihew to you (though, yes, I know, it doesn't quite follow the form), then you don't know what a clerihew is, or you cannot hear an earlessness. To be fair, clerihews are exactly what they need to be, humorous quatrains, and Creeley is playing with humor in this poems. But it's like playing with file . . . near a drum of gasoline, in Creeley's hands. The poems mimic the artlessness of the drawings, and they are such servants to the images that they merely illustrate. They barely even extend the drawings.

Only one poem did I enjoy, and it is the most jagged, the most Creeleyesque. Oh, it still rhymes (AABB, not quite Swedish), so it's not great, but it has a kind of half-rhyme/eye-rhyme going on between the second and fourth lines:

One word
              I heard
you said
              you read.

Not great, but a bit of recompense for a poor bus ride's set of poems


Booking Out

What's interesting here to me is that the poet I should have loved I hated, the poet I should have hated I held some warm feelings for (even if queasily), and the person I expected to be offputting I loved so much I wanted to bear her children (though I thought I have something backwards in that metaphor). Thank goodness I'm not a poet. I'd hate someone to expect me to entertain them well.


ecr. l'inf.