What do you think?
A Mouth in California
Poetry. A MOUTH IN CALIFORNIA, Graham Foust's fourth book of poetry, uses the ironies and anxieties of contemporary life as a foil for mordant and sometimes violent humor. Through mangled aphorisms, misheard song lyrics, and off-key phrasing, Foust creates a unique idiom of tragicomic pratfalls, a ballet of falling down. Yet the elasticity of Foust's language repels the stiff-necked adversaries of "what's the wrong way to break / that brick of truth back into music?"
- GenresPoetry
71 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 10, 2010
An extended review here would be de trop, because Ange Mlinko did such a stellar job in The Nation (as she always does). I thought, "Ooh ooh! I should point out the clever torque Foust gives to Pope's funny, insulting dog collar couplet at the end of his self-excoriating 'My Graham Foust,' but Ange had already been there. That's the strongest poem in here. Okay, even if that's a lie, it's the poem you'll most remember because of its musicality, its humor and its strong evocations of nearly forgotten poetic genres (the Vanitas, the mortal auto-ritrato). This is a dark collection of dubious scintillations. Its faces and voices are pulling themselves to pieces quite often. It's almost Halloween, and I'm wondering if Foust considered his release date for this grisly little beauty with the canniness Hollywood does. I'm thinking that's the case. Even though Brian Calvin's paintings which play with field/ground are good objective correlatives for Foust's poetics (which do the same), Francis Bacon is probably the portraitist Foust most closely resembles.
This collection is more than a little bit a haunted house. Perhaps the collection suffers somewhat from having too many targets, and some of them recurrent targets. The sterility of the academic treadmill and its forced chants come under attack in poems like "Real Job" ("To make a darkness. // To then light up the fortunate dead.") and "Academy Fight Song" ("What I get's / a nick of space, these reams of paper.") And the spate of poems detailing the failure of writers and the failure of writing, or worse, the futility of writing, these black celebrations, begin to grate somewhat. The reader does encounter breakthrough moments, such as in "We Arrive as if at a Picture, Pinched," where the poem foregrounds a seminal paradox of artistic empathy: "And just now our son stands on a dead (I / think) baby bird, and he touches that / cracked ceramic rabbit as if it's alive." For me, that image sort of crystallizes the weirdness of Foust's aesthetic in this book. That image reads somewhat as a self-incriminating statement, and is possibly a self-critique the book is covertly making against the book. Can books secretly raise insurrections against themselves? Mr. Lincoln may have been wrong about a house divided. I mean when we are talking art and not politics.
The poems are so often engaged in invective on art, that they sometimes lose the broader landscape of intuitive empathy. These poems prefer to implode. Not that I don't find poems that take off (baying like foxhounds) ekphrastically after say Bacon--or Goya's Capriccios--interesting or relevant--or poems that pattern themselves after Creeley's darker studies of human nature. Creeley was surely a major exemplar for this poet. But Creeley always balanced that darkness with an embrace of life and a generosity of spirit that turned the art back to the holy work of salvage--spiritual, intellectual and otherwise.
While I enjoy the poet's almost gongoristic intricacy of wordplay and his fine ear, I find the blinkered tonality ultimately detracts. The poet is inventively dark. True that. And it's true that if one walked into a Bacon retrospective, one would not encounter a subset of cheerful or spiritually uplifting works. (Here I am tempted to quote the closing line from Foust's poem for Jack Spicer, because it actually aspires to Baconian slough: "I am trying to make my skin run.") Probably the title of the book is a funny aknowledgment, an admission that the poet is well aware of his collection's mouthiness.
Several critics have appreciated the ramping up this collection presents, in terms of the finely-tooled prosody and stellar ear. Sometimes they have praised this work at the expense of the earlier, shorter poems which were the norm in the poet's previous books. I don't agree with those assessments. Empathy is much more closely allied with Negative Capability than the Atrabilious--even the witty atrabilious. It would be a Faustian shame if the poet ultimately decided to build an add-on bedroom for the Dark Muse that presided over this collection. Besides, he'd surely have to shop at an additional grocery store every time he went out on a run. Because I don't even want to imagine the sort of things such a Muse would have a hankering for. I mean always darkly pregnant. And all that.
This collection is more than a little bit a haunted house. Perhaps the collection suffers somewhat from having too many targets, and some of them recurrent targets. The sterility of the academic treadmill and its forced chants come under attack in poems like "Real Job" ("To make a darkness. // To then light up the fortunate dead.") and "Academy Fight Song" ("What I get's / a nick of space, these reams of paper.") And the spate of poems detailing the failure of writers and the failure of writing, or worse, the futility of writing, these black celebrations, begin to grate somewhat. The reader does encounter breakthrough moments, such as in "We Arrive as if at a Picture, Pinched," where the poem foregrounds a seminal paradox of artistic empathy: "And just now our son stands on a dead (I / think) baby bird, and he touches that / cracked ceramic rabbit as if it's alive." For me, that image sort of crystallizes the weirdness of Foust's aesthetic in this book. That image reads somewhat as a self-incriminating statement, and is possibly a self-critique the book is covertly making against the book. Can books secretly raise insurrections against themselves? Mr. Lincoln may have been wrong about a house divided. I mean when we are talking art and not politics.
The poems are so often engaged in invective on art, that they sometimes lose the broader landscape of intuitive empathy. These poems prefer to implode. Not that I don't find poems that take off (baying like foxhounds) ekphrastically after say Bacon--or Goya's Capriccios--interesting or relevant--or poems that pattern themselves after Creeley's darker studies of human nature. Creeley was surely a major exemplar for this poet. But Creeley always balanced that darkness with an embrace of life and a generosity of spirit that turned the art back to the holy work of salvage--spiritual, intellectual and otherwise.
While I enjoy the poet's almost gongoristic intricacy of wordplay and his fine ear, I find the blinkered tonality ultimately detracts. The poet is inventively dark. True that. And it's true that if one walked into a Bacon retrospective, one would not encounter a subset of cheerful or spiritually uplifting works. (Here I am tempted to quote the closing line from Foust's poem for Jack Spicer, because it actually aspires to Baconian slough: "I am trying to make my skin run.") Probably the title of the book is a funny aknowledgment, an admission that the poet is well aware of his collection's mouthiness.
Several critics have appreciated the ramping up this collection presents, in terms of the finely-tooled prosody and stellar ear. Sometimes they have praised this work at the expense of the earlier, shorter poems which were the norm in the poet's previous books. I don't agree with those assessments. Empathy is much more closely allied with Negative Capability than the Atrabilious--even the witty atrabilious. It would be a Faustian shame if the poet ultimately decided to build an add-on bedroom for the Dark Muse that presided over this collection. Besides, he'd surely have to shop at an additional grocery store every time he went out on a run. Because I don't even want to imagine the sort of things such a Muse would have a hankering for. I mean always darkly pregnant. And all that.
September 30, 2013
Like Shakespeare with Internet access and keys to the highway.
May 1, 2011
fucking wow
February 12, 2010
My review is here: http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/...
April 15, 2025
All it takes is a couple poems that I feel like I have to read to my wife out loud for a book of poetry to get four stars. This one had five.
June 9, 2010
Here Graham Foust scuttles the reticence that marked his first three volumes, and finds a discursive mode within a fairly loose, tetrameter rhythm; the poems frequently fail to be about anything other than the poet's self-estrangement, but there are crucial exceptions, worth seeking out in the author's longest book yet: "Outbox", "Happening Pastoral", "My Graham Foust", and "Their Early Twenties."
Ange Mlinko, in an essay in The Nation called "Gramaphoons,"
my link text
straightens out Foust's slanted discourse more energetically than I'd be willing, and my only hesitancy in recommending her review is that it seems to offer as the crux of Foust's poems a tension between "democratic speech" (gotten out of her reading of Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic) and Foustian "bric a brac" (or gramaphooning) that favors the erotic "sex appeal" of Foust's "sly titles and rough enjambments" (that last one an artifice of turning, if ever there was one). Mlinko does very well to see that "these poems instruct the reader to become what you like so you can like what you are." If an insight like that doesn't speak to Foust's appropriation of the period style to do exactly as poets of the New Left instructed us to be wary of, or, for some of us, the consequent difficulty of finding what to love in his work, I don't know what does.
Ange Mlinko, in an essay in The Nation called "Gramaphoons,"
my link text
straightens out Foust's slanted discourse more energetically than I'd be willing, and my only hesitancy in recommending her review is that it seems to offer as the crux of Foust's poems a tension between "democratic speech" (gotten out of her reading of Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic) and Foustian "bric a brac" (or gramaphooning) that favors the erotic "sex appeal" of Foust's "sly titles and rough enjambments" (that last one an artifice of turning, if ever there was one). Mlinko does very well to see that "these poems instruct the reader to become what you like so you can like what you are." If an insight like that doesn't speak to Foust's appropriation of the period style to do exactly as poets of the New Left instructed us to be wary of, or, for some of us, the consequent difficulty of finding what to love in his work, I don't know what does.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews