Voyaging Portraits: Poetry

by Gustaf Sobin, Sobin

Gustaf Sobin’s  Voyaging Portraits  is the newest collection by the American poet and longtime resident of Provence. The voice of these poems is the voyager, moving across a landscape that is both physical and existential, and the portraits it continually casts hover at the precarious limits of language. The book is laid out in five sections. “Of Neither Wind nor Anemones,” set in the Mediterranean basin, introduces the work’s major the poem’s quest for its own hidden imagery across the shifting ground of the evocable. “Against a Bleached Viridian,” located in the hills of Provence (with its suns, moons, snails, pathways, its vineyards and orchards), depicts a nature menaced by asphyxia. “A Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables” traces the author’s early years in self-elected exile. “Along America’s Edges” extends to the metaphoric rim of North America. The locale of the conclusion, “Of the Four-winged Cherubim as Signature,” is Italy, among the accumulated layers of Western culture.

Genres: Poetry

121 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[W.B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm so divided on Sobin and poets like Sobin, in general. I had given this five stars once. I reread the book this week and adjusted that rating in the name of accuracy. What changed, the book or me or the ether between us?

So who are "poets like Sobin, in general?" Well, sound-driven poets whose primary obsession and raison d'etre is the mysticism of sound. This is a theme from time immemorial, a mystic's theme and pretty much a universal one. Pythagoras, Sufism, Mohammed's bell that rang on and on, dictating scripture to him, Hindu mantras. More recent manifestations might include the Blavatskian strains in the School, soi-disant, of Theosophy. People are still making YouTube videos of the mandalas that form in sand when a drum head upon which it rests is vibrated. Sobin is all about that bass (but he also likes treble, according to his lyric).

So sound is cool. Agreed. But here's the thing. Poetry is not Brian Eno or Talking Heads. Sound is tied down to a procrustean bed without real tones. A fullness of sound is being described in a lower dialect or pidgin of sound (spoken language). English is not a tonal language and even the tonal languages are ridiculously not-all-that-tonal when compared to music. So the sound mystic's job becomes worshiping sound in its fullness, but doing it in a debased language which is bereft of (arguably) the best features of sound (glorious textures, pitches, duration). And this Sobin does for a lifetime.

And the breaking of words, the endless syllabic (and other) breaks Sobin uses to foreground what, the gnashing of time's teeth on language, a reminder that words come apart over time as easily as they form, starts to feel like a tic and a strategy to fill up the page quicker. Sometimes the breaks seem arbitrary and un-enlightening: not leaven for the bread of poetry to rise, but filler to sell more crab cakes.

All of this is a long-winded (and defensive) way of admitting I find the poems in this collection more than a little bombastic. Sobin is erudite, undeniably so. Sobin has done his reading. Sobin has his pantheon and will make it known to you through this poetry. But on this reading I found myself wanting to relegate large parts of this book to what a critic (whose name eludes me) once called The Great Gossamer Gnat-Winged School of Poetry. There's nothing wrong with airy nothings. They can be poetry as quickly as anything else can. But you don't want too much air in your car's tires or they might explode. Sorry for the mixed metaphor, but I'm talking about the spell poetry should cast when it's working well. You don't want to try the reader's patience with too many picayune distinctions. I think Sobin does that in this book.

Make no mistake. Sobin is trying to hypnotize you with sound in this collection. He's going to bring all his erudition into the game to that end and he's going to go down a number of arcane alleys, dragging you by the ear (or maybe you are blindly following like Cegeste or that emo (still a word?) guy in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari).

Some of the smaller poems might avoid this offensiveness a bit more than the longer poems, where their grandiosity is their own worst enemy, and falterings occur.

souleu

path, my
needle, my os-
cillating

constant,
would take
what

you'd drawn,
driven
under, that

narrowest
of noons, glint

that
dis-
closes the oval.


While I find this poem pleasant, it's a very banal sort of pleasantness. The syllabic breaks seem fake, not illuminating. If you wrote the poem out as a long sentence, would it seem more like bad poetry? What is the oval which is disclosed? The mouth of the beloved? A form in nature? Some might enjoy the liberty to let the mind play and wander, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle here. For me, it's a little less than interesting.

"The sound must seem an echo to the sense." Box not checked.

The thing with Sobin is that you either get hypnotized or you don't. Upon rereading this collection, I did get hypnotized by poems like "Transparent Itineraries: 1984." This is a rhapsodic poem all about...one guess...sound. Yes, it's about how sound mystically embodies both time and the human body. That too. But the theme is a shirt worn once too often. In fact, Sobin never changes his shirt once throughout the entire collection. And so you start scrutinizing the pattern on that shirt. It might go from being engaging to being boring. Or even silly.

Poets who rely too much on sound, or who allow sound to direct the traffic flow of their words without opposing it diligently, sometimes come in for cruel judgments later. I love much of Dylan Thomas. And there are many poems in that slim oeuvre I find pretty bad. I notice the contemporary critical consensus on sound-drive Dylan is starting to go over to the red. There is skepticism and even cynicism. I don't know how much of that might be tainted by judgments about the poet's life and personality. I think largely it's just honest judgment based on dissatisfaction with a certain monomaniacal, mystical tendency in Thomas, one which Sobin largely shares. Say anything if you can put it in a good wash of assonance and consonance.

But sometimes this is nice. I only want to complain when I want to complain:

over Goult, where the
lavendar foams, and lizards--through
the dry
thyme--sizzle,
read rocks. read

walls.

Did I fail to mention that Sobin took off to Provence early in life and never came back. Lived in that landscape and lived that landscape? Well, he did. And you will get that in the collection, which many readers see as that landscape embodied.

Some people will be outraged if you "touch" Sobin. Because he's carefully cultivated the archetype of what a poet should be. His biography shows us a weird asceticism rooted in the poetic apostolic successions which poets love every bit as much as the Catholic Church cherishes its own lineage. And he hung around Heidegger and listened to him shoot the breeze with Rene Char. So he should have linguistic cred. So he was a Man in Man World. I don't think these things should influence our judgment when evaluating the poetry.

It's hard not to want to read Celan before or right after Sobin. There are so many commonalities and similarities in strategy.

"What the Music Wants," dedicated to George Oppen, is really an apologia for Sobin's own poetics. It's a good poem, one of the better ones in here, I think, but it sort of lapses into bombast at the very end. The sound starts to skew the sense. He goes Swinburnian and not in a good way. The nineteenth century buzzword wrapt appears more than once in this collection (thrice?) in that annoying orthographic form. Once would have been pushing it.

Nice opening though. Here we encounter sound as a creature seeking embodiment in us (and everything else it can come through) almost willfully, pareidolically:

what the music
wants is
pod and tentacle (the thing
wriggling,
wild

as washed
hair, spread). is our-
selves, in-

serted."

"Idyll," the poem which immediately precedes this one is also a strong poem.

Here's the thing about Sobin. I recommend buying his Collected Poems, because I do believe his poetry is very liberating. It will help you to fall through the interstices in language that you should fall through, Alice-like. One Sobin makes you larger and one Sobin makes you small. It's worth experiencing these deformations in yourself and your world-view. Sometimes you will argue with the poetry (as you should). Sometimes you will spit the poetry out (as you should). It's an imperfect collection with much wiggle room for the spirit.

It was this well-written eulogy that caused me to revisit this Sobin collection: http://jacketmagazine.com/40/sobin-in...

And here is a neatly-composed little poem by Sobin that appeared in an issue of Conjunctions: http://www.conjunctions.com/print/art...

One can love a poet and be skeptical. I love the world and am skeptical of it. Why should my relationship with poets be any different?

[Kiera Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Admittedly, I like Sobin. But, his writing is pretentious and inaccessible. I often found myself confused by his word choices, his use of form, and the thrust of the poem throughout my reading. Sobin seems so unwaveringly enamored with the sounds of syllables and words that meaning, place, and feelings are left behind like a notable christmas movie involving a french vacation. Continuing this metaphor, Sobin seems more fascinated in the family's european hootenanny than the eyecatching excitement going on back in chicago. However, when Sobin decides to show the interesting stuff, it blossoms and grows into something ethereal.

I'm abandoning this metaphor here. But, in short, Sobin creates some magic. Particularly in "the translation of waves"

[Andra Vltavín · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poet uses the deconstruction of language itself to make his visual images more striking. Excellent work with loads of interweaving intentions and delicate play with form.