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The Chinaman
A fine copy in a fine dust jacket.
- GenresPoetry
85 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
18 people want to read
About the author
David Mamet
228 books739 followersDavid Alan Mamet is an American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. His works are known for their clever, terse, sometimes vulgar dialogue and arcane stylized phrasing, as well as for his exploration of masculinity.
As a playwright, he received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).
Mamet's recent books include The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and antisemitism; and Bambi vs. Godzilla, an acerbic commentary on the movie business.
As a playwright, he received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).
Mamet's recent books include The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and antisemitism; and Bambi vs. Godzilla, an acerbic commentary on the movie business.
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June 28, 2011
Sometimes the opening stanza of the first poem in a book of verse is a pretty reliable advertisement for what is to follow. Here is the opener for “A Victorian Painter”:
It pissed cold rain the whole time.
Fumes stank up the town
A frog washed out of the street and down.
Too tired by half. And the thick slime
Looked dead on his back
Pissing rain: Mamet is going for the gritty. Tough guys only! On page 58 there is even a poem called “Song of the Sissies” that is virtually incomprehensible in its scorn and disdain (and, for reasons I cannot fathom, has virtually every word capitalized). No sissies here, no sir. But then this is David Mamet, the man who has done for bullshit what Vesalius did for cadavers, he flensed ‘em right down to the bone.
Even before you get to the first poem, you know Mamet's book is going to be poetic rough trade: obviously, the title of the book is blatantly not Politically Correct. Well, I have no problem with this per se, but there should be some reason for stirring the pot beyond mere spleen. Here is the title poem in its entirety:
The Chinaman
I am a Mandarin Chinee.
My fingernail is long,
I drink gunpowder tea;
And the wild monkey’s song
Delights me in its pain
As his skull is made hot
That I may eat his brain.
See my retainers’ lot,
Who expiate the sin
Of their vile birth
Serving the Mandarin.
But what is our pride worth
Who stand as commanded,
Where doth the logic fail?
Some are conceived to heat the monkey’s head,
Some to drink tea and to display the fingernail.
This struck me as being crass in a “Jackass” sort of way. If the title wern't enough to goad the sissies, there’s the use of the archaic Wild West term “Chinee” and even a dab of what appears to be quasi-pidgin dialect. There’s also the mocking of “oriental” culture with those outlandish monkey brains, a dab of scary cuisine right out of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (years ago all the kids were doing bad imitations of Indiana Jones’ nemesis, lisping about “chilled monkey brains” out on the playground). So yeah, like many stale jokey clichés o’ the zeitgeist, I get it. But how is Mamet’s use of this Fu Man Chu stuff going beyond the wit of a frat boy joking about deep-fried puppies down at the Chinese buffet? Not funny enough to be a joke, there is not much to this poem beyond a banal (and characteristically grim) social commentary about the employer-employee nexus. Adjusting the clichés, Mamet could’ve just as plausibly called it “The Bohunk” or “The Hillbilly.” This isn’t edgy – it’s boorish. Glen Garry-Glen Chop Suey.
****
Well, when serious writers who are not otherwise poets write poetry, the result is sometime interesting in a clinical way if nothing else. I’m thinking of Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, whose verse productions have an unusually stilted and archaic feel, as if the writer had donned a Shakespearean millstone ruff, doublet, and hose before sharpening his goose-quill pen. This kind of stiltedness is not immediately apparent in Mamet’s book, but it does reveal itself. There’s the capitalized letter at the start of every line in almost every poem, even those that are rendered in free verse. There is a use of rhyme that is mostly clumsy and forced. There is the high-toned, über-profound diction that, in this case, Mamet would never dream of using in a play (“Neither the song nor woman / Would be understood / Except they were possessed.” Blah blah blah, p. 35). There is the occasional use of antique diction (“doth” and “thee”) that is probably meant to be ironic but which always (always!) comes off sounding silly and amateur. If not supposed to be ironic, then no, you are not channeling Beaumont and Fletcher, forsooth. And of course, there is the heart-felt and excruciatingly vulnerable love poem. Here is something Paul McCartney wouldn’t’ve touched with his Hofner violin bass back in his “Silly Love Songs” days:
For Rebecca
I thought I knew
What love was
Before I met you
But I did not know…
Then there’s the culture fatigue that comes with being a well-traveled celebrity. Mamet goes to France a lot, apparently, so there’s some poems about France. Part of one is rendered in actual French (“Fellow”): “O la, Monsieur le Pretre…” and something about trousers on a bear (pantalons si bruins?). Or maybe not.
***
The stronger or more distinct a writer’s style, the more vulnerable he is to parody, and especially self-parody. Mamet has one of the most distinct styles in American letters, and at their worst, these poems can be astonishingly Mametian. Here is the opening of a five-and-a-half page Penny Dreadful called “The Triumph of Gravity, A Three Part Poem of the Hotel”:
The Plague year.
The hotel.
The suicide.
Old Billy Barcus wristcuffed to the radiator.
Hookers and the old men hawk their guts up in the lobby.
Upstairs little girls and boys come in from the suburbs,
took their mother’s (sic?) car, to suck each other’s genitalia.
Old grease and the piss smell of too-weak coffee sits in one
side of the lobby.
Cooks with scalded forearms take a cigarette from out the
greasy spoon. They all are filthy. They are fat.
Their bellies barely rest inside their stiffened aprons.
All of the are spitting in the soup. Their bloated fingers
scoop the salads from the bins…
The dire scene-mongering goes immediately out of control. With all the hawking and filth and wristcuffing, there is also “too-weak coffee” and those salads in bins (salads? They serve salads in this joint?). These are such funny little details, such examples of fussy metropolitan kvetch, that I came to suspect this was a joke, a poem written by Seinfeld’s Kramer were Kramer to write poems of the Ashcan School sort. Here’s some more ick, taken from the second page:
…The wilted lettuce in the garbage on each floor.
The remnants of the hamburgers, the condoms. Catsup-
covered sporting pages, magazines, the semen-covered
fold-outs. Tissues filled with sputum of tuberculars.
They had a boy was (sic) handcuffed to the toilet for a while
they took him out (sic). The gamblers in the lobby said they
knew. He could have stayed in there and bitten through
his wrist. Perhaps he liked it.
Beyond the third-rate “Reservoir Dogs” sadism and the spray-on dirt, note the lack of control, the inability to convincingly set the scene. By this I mean Mamet uses the wrong words, which I will demonstrate with a little workshop exercise of the sort the college kids do down at the MFA programs:
Lettuce: again, stop with the salad components. Here in “The Hotel” the residents are presumably not heart-healthy. Not “on each floor” for sure.
Sporting pages: Is this supposed to be 1892? Toffs with monocles and watch fobs come to mind. I can handle that these pages are “catsup-covered” but why the line break between catsup- and covered?
Semen-covered fold-outs: First catsup, now semen besmirches the scene. Hmmm. Well, “semen” is far too clinical for the situation (recall, if you will, “scumbag” is c. 1930s slang for a used condom). Fold-outs are typically called centerfolds, so I’ve been told by Hugh Hefner, who for decades insisted on calling them “gatefolds.” Whatever you call them, the image conjures up adolescent boys’ bedrooms rather than Hotel Hell.
Tissues filled with sputum of tuberculars: Sputum and tuberculars? Stop with the Victoriana already! What’s next? Catarrh? The Vapors? Snot and TB would be a little more contemporary. As for the tissues, well, I just don’t think these knuckleheads are going to be using tissues, or if they do, they won’t call them “tissues.” More likely, they’ll cough up their lung biscuits directly onto the floor.
The gamblers in the lobby: Is this a Kenny Rogers video from 1980 set in 1850? Mississippi riverboats and fancy waistcoats come to mind. But to give Mamet credit, the gamblers with their “sporting pages” do work together pretty fine if you want to do the Keystone Kops tumbling over each other in The Bowery.
They had a boy was (sic) handcuffed to the toilet for a while…: why “handcuffed” here but “wristcuffed” at the beginning? A niggling complaint, but you know what they used to say about poems: every word counts. That unnecessary “was” is probably an editing error (this book came with a loose errata slip for another problem elsewhere), but it is also possible Mamet is trying for street argot of the made-up Literary Bad Guy variety.
Bitten through his wrist: Bitten? Really? How about “gnawed” or “chewed” instead? Bitten is what mosquitoes do, or what I do to donuts.
What bothers me most about this crap is the fact David Mamet has perhaps the most subtle, sensitive ear in American Letters (see his play “Oleanna”) and so you just know he is snoozing through this poem. And then it gets worse: the end of the poem departs from the gritty low-budget noire claptrap and goes off into Deep Thoughts mode.
“Our home is in the sun.” Those things we find here –
and we find them for a reason – are too slick or sharp.
It causes blood to flow.
It is not real.
Nor either is the fuse.
And nor the broken glass.
The light is out and we must go.
Our home is in the sun.
How can we violate that trust,
Whose home is in the sun?
Jim Morrison 1969, man! “Waiting for the sun, waiting for the sun, waaaaiiiiting for the suuuuunnnn….” Although my own mastery of grammar and syntax is pretty poor, I felt myself wanting the skill to parse “Nor either is the fuse” (how about the word “neither” here?) and “we…whose home is in the sun.” Perhaps technically these passages are correct, but they don’t sound that way. Overall (trying to put this into a literary context), I’d guess Mamet is trying for a Deep Image effect – that old stones and bones school of versifying practiced by James Wright, Robert Bly and a tiresome hoard of imitators in the 1960s-1970s. The sun is a reliable (and hackneyed) image for The Elemental. Blood and broken glass are popular tropes in this mode as well.
But then many of the poems in “The Chinaman” are characterized by persistent high-toned basso-profundo attempts at significance. Big Topics are attacked head on, like Custer riding into the Little Big Horn. Poetry for Mamet seems to be a way to get things done. But of course poetry, as W. H. Auden said somewhere, doesn’t make anything happen, to wit:
The French Automaton
The French Automaton – The Janissary
Of Sightless Fortune. Miracle Revealed.
Thespian Mamleuke. Constrained to Wield
Weapons of disingenuous display.
Spectators, likewise, from Component rest,
Jerked into life and marshaled toward the tomb
Enmotioned by we-know-not what behest,
Dance for the pleasure of we-know-not-whom.
Goodness gracious, what in the world is this? Weapons are wielded, I’ll grant you that. I recently read a book on Napoleon and so have at hand, for the moment, a few half-remembered bits of Egyptian and Ottoman history – Janissaries were Christian slaves kidnapped in the Balkans and raised to be elite soldiers for the Sultan. The Mamelukes were an Egyptian ruler-warrior class nominally tied to the Ottoman Empire – Napoleon fought ‘em, so perhaps this is the French connection the reader is supposed to make. Who knows? This is a black hole of a poem, collapsed on its own center, all light extinguished by its own terrible, terrible gravity. To be sure, I felt the tug of its relentless senseless energy and it filled me with despair, not for what it says, but for its pitiless “disingenuous display.”
But these French Mameluke Automatons are not the only instance of Mamet’s gnomic, riddling approach to profundity. Here’s one with a lighter, riddling slant:
A Charade
A piece of paper
Which appeared to be blank
But on which we see
Writing had faded.
“My first is of the
possessive of those
given to possession.
And my last, the finality
Of proposition
In entirety I give
That which in three worlds doth live.
Ungainly in the two’;
In all, long-legged beauty,
Much as you.”
Upon the paper which had come to fade
We strain to see
An ancient charade.
Can you decipher me?
Nope. I cannot decipher you. Don’t want to, actually. All the straining and fading and the ancient charade, not to mention the “finality of proposition that which in three worlds doth live” all strike me as pure blithering vatic nonsense. The first four lines are incredibly clumsy set up (go ahead, read them aloud), with random line breaks made worse by the first-word capitalization Mamet insists on.
I’d guess that these poems are larded with irony, of course. Whatever in the world isn’t these days? But irony comes in a mailed fist here, if it comes at all. There’s nothing remotely pleasurable here, no compelling concrete details, no convincing moments of wit. Of course in his prose Mamet is rarely funny. This is not necessarily a fault, but it does have a tendency to limit his range. We get lots and lots of dire “meaning” piled on with all the subtlety of plate tectonics.
Well, this is kind of close to The Universal almost being rescued by Wit:
Vermont, January
Lord of fire, God of the sword
Three hundred American dollars reward
Dog ran off yesterday afternoon
And I got to head down country soon.
God sent a Savior to cleanse our sins
And Jesus died for you and me
Bread and butter, bitters and gin
That we might sin with impunity.
The track of the plough around the pole
Cold bear sleeping in a snowy hole
The depth of the woods the lure of the fair –
Cassiopeia in her easy chair.
This is better than a lot of crappy poems I read – it kind of reminded me of a dyspeptic existential Ogden Nash. The final stanza made me smile with gratitude. But this is as good as it gets, and finally, it is just another massive Temple of Dire Significance. Notice the Divine references. God and Jesus aka Christ aka “a Savior” show up a lot in these poems, but I am not sure why. The mere presence of these words does, I suppose, imply that religious poetry is going on in some fashion. But mostly the Divine is used as a far too easy background over which Mamet can scribble down another fallen/depraved mankind foreground scene. Although my own religious sensibilities are so blighted and atrophied that I’m hard to offend, there’s something cheap about the pop-up Jesus and God and divine whatnots that managed to displease even my flinty little soul. Jesus seems to function as yet another “deep image” prop, like a stone or a bone or the sun or the cold pissing rain.
***
Mamet’s attempts at rendering nature are mostly off-the-shelf or simply inept. Here’s the opener for “The Pond at Twilight”:
Vast black crows in the smoke yard
Mock the hand that sowed the field.
Dry summer or cold spring
Leached color from the Pond
The White Sign said at twilight:
“Do not pursue me, for I flee.”
Incomprehensible, save we reflect
That it is not for Man.
Indeed, I’ll bet those crows are black. But how are they “vast”? Did he mean vast flocks? Or are these sci-fi giant Mothra vs. Godzilla crows? It doesn’t matter, really, because Nature here, as pretty much everywhere else in the book is merely used as a signifier for Yet More Deep Thoughts – note that the pond is the Pond and the man is Man. This could be meant to be ironic, I suppose, but so what? Taking it straight or with a wink and a nudge, this is still pretty poor stuff. The second stanza heightens the tension and cements the doleful Man/Nature comparison:
Not in pursuit of food
But in idolatrous and awkward
Folly called understanding,
Now the faro box, or Politics
Lends that compulsion:
And the urge to husband energy,
Warped from the fight for food,
Impels our self predation
As the deer on the pond, barking alarm,
Torn down by dogs,
Dies screaming like a bad impulse…
The deer barks at the dogs, dear reader. Maybe deer really do make barking-like sounds when under attack, but sometimes, Mr. Mamet, you just gotta ignore reality. And so both barking and screaming goeth the poor deer, and us too, so he tells us. And what’s with the faro box? Again, stop with the antique Billiards Room naughty pursuits! I guess I should be thankful they’re not playing whist. The Top Dog, no doubt, got a Cadillac. The second dog got a set of steak knives. The third dog got to keep his job…
Or, to use an old Robert Frost trope, sometimes poems, like a pat of butter on a hot stove, sizzle away on the melting of their own nonsense.
***
Now and again Mamet blunders into a fragment of real, actual, living poetry.
Billy the Weasel
the and now said billy the weasel
If I had thee by my side
What would I not joy to brave?
Four Hundred Pieces of a Scary Ride
As a whole, this is another one of Mamet’s gnomic toss-offs, but that last line is a killer fragment and I wish I’d written it (my highest compliment). He’d have sold twice as many copies of this book if he’d called the whole shebang “Four Hundred Pieces of a Scary Ride.” How echt-Mamet that sounds.
***
I’ll come clean: I did not read all of these poems. I didn’t read all of Jewel’s, Leonard Nimoy’s, Ally Sheedy’s or Suzanne Somer’s books of verse either. I wish celebrities, when they feel the need to express themselves outside their areas of expertise would pick on something other than poetry. Take up pottery, or glue together a stained glass window. The Chinaman is a beautifully printed clothbound book (nice work Overlook Press) that just takes up resources for something that might’ve been competent.
Of course David Mamet is not Suzanne Somers or Leonard Nimoy. He is a serious writer I truly admire (especially “Oleanna” and his script for the brilliant Paul Newman movie “The Verdict.”). What goes wrong here, I suspect, is that Mamet reads poetry that appears with depressing frequency in “The New Yorker” and “Poetry” magazine and he cringes at the attenuated little dabs of precious psycho-social metaphysics that characterize so many poems found there. So he’s going to toughen ups this spineless goo, by God, fix it up like another dumbo Hollywood script, and so he forges these iron nails and thumbscrews and bayonets in the Smithy of his Soul. The problem is, of course, that the hard-boiled has been boiled far too long, the elemental long since rendered down to the merely elementary. Poetry is difficult because the obvious stuff has all been done before, and done right into the ground for the most part. Or, as Randall Jarrell put it: “Writing good poetry is only occasionally difficult: usually it is impossible.”
And so, note to all celebrity poets (no matter how formidable and substantial your other accomplishments with the pen): poems, contrary to what you might think, are actually harder to write than novels, plays, screen-adaptations and political essays. They just are. That’s why there’s so few good ones out there.
It pissed cold rain the whole time.
Fumes stank up the town
A frog washed out of the street and down.
Too tired by half. And the thick slime
Looked dead on his back
Pissing rain: Mamet is going for the gritty. Tough guys only! On page 58 there is even a poem called “Song of the Sissies” that is virtually incomprehensible in its scorn and disdain (and, for reasons I cannot fathom, has virtually every word capitalized). No sissies here, no sir. But then this is David Mamet, the man who has done for bullshit what Vesalius did for cadavers, he flensed ‘em right down to the bone.
Even before you get to the first poem, you know Mamet's book is going to be poetic rough trade: obviously, the title of the book is blatantly not Politically Correct. Well, I have no problem with this per se, but there should be some reason for stirring the pot beyond mere spleen. Here is the title poem in its entirety:
The Chinaman
I am a Mandarin Chinee.
My fingernail is long,
I drink gunpowder tea;
And the wild monkey’s song
Delights me in its pain
As his skull is made hot
That I may eat his brain.
See my retainers’ lot,
Who expiate the sin
Of their vile birth
Serving the Mandarin.
But what is our pride worth
Who stand as commanded,
Where doth the logic fail?
Some are conceived to heat the monkey’s head,
Some to drink tea and to display the fingernail.
This struck me as being crass in a “Jackass” sort of way. If the title wern't enough to goad the sissies, there’s the use of the archaic Wild West term “Chinee” and even a dab of what appears to be quasi-pidgin dialect. There’s also the mocking of “oriental” culture with those outlandish monkey brains, a dab of scary cuisine right out of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (years ago all the kids were doing bad imitations of Indiana Jones’ nemesis, lisping about “chilled monkey brains” out on the playground). So yeah, like many stale jokey clichés o’ the zeitgeist, I get it. But how is Mamet’s use of this Fu Man Chu stuff going beyond the wit of a frat boy joking about deep-fried puppies down at the Chinese buffet? Not funny enough to be a joke, there is not much to this poem beyond a banal (and characteristically grim) social commentary about the employer-employee nexus. Adjusting the clichés, Mamet could’ve just as plausibly called it “The Bohunk” or “The Hillbilly.” This isn’t edgy – it’s boorish. Glen Garry-Glen Chop Suey.
****
Well, when serious writers who are not otherwise poets write poetry, the result is sometime interesting in a clinical way if nothing else. I’m thinking of Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, whose verse productions have an unusually stilted and archaic feel, as if the writer had donned a Shakespearean millstone ruff, doublet, and hose before sharpening his goose-quill pen. This kind of stiltedness is not immediately apparent in Mamet’s book, but it does reveal itself. There’s the capitalized letter at the start of every line in almost every poem, even those that are rendered in free verse. There is a use of rhyme that is mostly clumsy and forced. There is the high-toned, über-profound diction that, in this case, Mamet would never dream of using in a play (“Neither the song nor woman / Would be understood / Except they were possessed.” Blah blah blah, p. 35). There is the occasional use of antique diction (“doth” and “thee”) that is probably meant to be ironic but which always (always!) comes off sounding silly and amateur. If not supposed to be ironic, then no, you are not channeling Beaumont and Fletcher, forsooth. And of course, there is the heart-felt and excruciatingly vulnerable love poem. Here is something Paul McCartney wouldn’t’ve touched with his Hofner violin bass back in his “Silly Love Songs” days:
For Rebecca
I thought I knew
What love was
Before I met you
But I did not know…
Then there’s the culture fatigue that comes with being a well-traveled celebrity. Mamet goes to France a lot, apparently, so there’s some poems about France. Part of one is rendered in actual French (“Fellow”): “O la, Monsieur le Pretre…” and something about trousers on a bear (pantalons si bruins?). Or maybe not.
***
The stronger or more distinct a writer’s style, the more vulnerable he is to parody, and especially self-parody. Mamet has one of the most distinct styles in American letters, and at their worst, these poems can be astonishingly Mametian. Here is the opening of a five-and-a-half page Penny Dreadful called “The Triumph of Gravity, A Three Part Poem of the Hotel”:
The Plague year.
The hotel.
The suicide.
Old Billy Barcus wristcuffed to the radiator.
Hookers and the old men hawk their guts up in the lobby.
Upstairs little girls and boys come in from the suburbs,
took their mother’s (sic?) car, to suck each other’s genitalia.
Old grease and the piss smell of too-weak coffee sits in one
side of the lobby.
Cooks with scalded forearms take a cigarette from out the
greasy spoon. They all are filthy. They are fat.
Their bellies barely rest inside their stiffened aprons.
All of the are spitting in the soup. Their bloated fingers
scoop the salads from the bins…
The dire scene-mongering goes immediately out of control. With all the hawking and filth and wristcuffing, there is also “too-weak coffee” and those salads in bins (salads? They serve salads in this joint?). These are such funny little details, such examples of fussy metropolitan kvetch, that I came to suspect this was a joke, a poem written by Seinfeld’s Kramer were Kramer to write poems of the Ashcan School sort. Here’s some more ick, taken from the second page:
…The wilted lettuce in the garbage on each floor.
The remnants of the hamburgers, the condoms. Catsup-
covered sporting pages, magazines, the semen-covered
fold-outs. Tissues filled with sputum of tuberculars.
They had a boy was (sic) handcuffed to the toilet for a while
they took him out (sic). The gamblers in the lobby said they
knew. He could have stayed in there and bitten through
his wrist. Perhaps he liked it.
Beyond the third-rate “Reservoir Dogs” sadism and the spray-on dirt, note the lack of control, the inability to convincingly set the scene. By this I mean Mamet uses the wrong words, which I will demonstrate with a little workshop exercise of the sort the college kids do down at the MFA programs:
Lettuce: again, stop with the salad components. Here in “The Hotel” the residents are presumably not heart-healthy. Not “on each floor” for sure.
Sporting pages: Is this supposed to be 1892? Toffs with monocles and watch fobs come to mind. I can handle that these pages are “catsup-covered” but why the line break between catsup- and covered?
Semen-covered fold-outs: First catsup, now semen besmirches the scene. Hmmm. Well, “semen” is far too clinical for the situation (recall, if you will, “scumbag” is c. 1930s slang for a used condom). Fold-outs are typically called centerfolds, so I’ve been told by Hugh Hefner, who for decades insisted on calling them “gatefolds.” Whatever you call them, the image conjures up adolescent boys’ bedrooms rather than Hotel Hell.
Tissues filled with sputum of tuberculars: Sputum and tuberculars? Stop with the Victoriana already! What’s next? Catarrh? The Vapors? Snot and TB would be a little more contemporary. As for the tissues, well, I just don’t think these knuckleheads are going to be using tissues, or if they do, they won’t call them “tissues.” More likely, they’ll cough up their lung biscuits directly onto the floor.
The gamblers in the lobby: Is this a Kenny Rogers video from 1980 set in 1850? Mississippi riverboats and fancy waistcoats come to mind. But to give Mamet credit, the gamblers with their “sporting pages” do work together pretty fine if you want to do the Keystone Kops tumbling over each other in The Bowery.
They had a boy was (sic) handcuffed to the toilet for a while…: why “handcuffed” here but “wristcuffed” at the beginning? A niggling complaint, but you know what they used to say about poems: every word counts. That unnecessary “was” is probably an editing error (this book came with a loose errata slip for another problem elsewhere), but it is also possible Mamet is trying for street argot of the made-up Literary Bad Guy variety.
Bitten through his wrist: Bitten? Really? How about “gnawed” or “chewed” instead? Bitten is what mosquitoes do, or what I do to donuts.
What bothers me most about this crap is the fact David Mamet has perhaps the most subtle, sensitive ear in American Letters (see his play “Oleanna”) and so you just know he is snoozing through this poem. And then it gets worse: the end of the poem departs from the gritty low-budget noire claptrap and goes off into Deep Thoughts mode.
“Our home is in the sun.” Those things we find here –
and we find them for a reason – are too slick or sharp.
It causes blood to flow.
It is not real.
Nor either is the fuse.
And nor the broken glass.
The light is out and we must go.
Our home is in the sun.
How can we violate that trust,
Whose home is in the sun?
Jim Morrison 1969, man! “Waiting for the sun, waiting for the sun, waaaaiiiiting for the suuuuunnnn….” Although my own mastery of grammar and syntax is pretty poor, I felt myself wanting the skill to parse “Nor either is the fuse” (how about the word “neither” here?) and “we…whose home is in the sun.” Perhaps technically these passages are correct, but they don’t sound that way. Overall (trying to put this into a literary context), I’d guess Mamet is trying for a Deep Image effect – that old stones and bones school of versifying practiced by James Wright, Robert Bly and a tiresome hoard of imitators in the 1960s-1970s. The sun is a reliable (and hackneyed) image for The Elemental. Blood and broken glass are popular tropes in this mode as well.
But then many of the poems in “The Chinaman” are characterized by persistent high-toned basso-profundo attempts at significance. Big Topics are attacked head on, like Custer riding into the Little Big Horn. Poetry for Mamet seems to be a way to get things done. But of course poetry, as W. H. Auden said somewhere, doesn’t make anything happen, to wit:
The French Automaton
The French Automaton – The Janissary
Of Sightless Fortune. Miracle Revealed.
Thespian Mamleuke. Constrained to Wield
Weapons of disingenuous display.
Spectators, likewise, from Component rest,
Jerked into life and marshaled toward the tomb
Enmotioned by we-know-not what behest,
Dance for the pleasure of we-know-not-whom.
Goodness gracious, what in the world is this? Weapons are wielded, I’ll grant you that. I recently read a book on Napoleon and so have at hand, for the moment, a few half-remembered bits of Egyptian and Ottoman history – Janissaries were Christian slaves kidnapped in the Balkans and raised to be elite soldiers for the Sultan. The Mamelukes were an Egyptian ruler-warrior class nominally tied to the Ottoman Empire – Napoleon fought ‘em, so perhaps this is the French connection the reader is supposed to make. Who knows? This is a black hole of a poem, collapsed on its own center, all light extinguished by its own terrible, terrible gravity. To be sure, I felt the tug of its relentless senseless energy and it filled me with despair, not for what it says, but for its pitiless “disingenuous display.”
But these French Mameluke Automatons are not the only instance of Mamet’s gnomic, riddling approach to profundity. Here’s one with a lighter, riddling slant:
A Charade
A piece of paper
Which appeared to be blank
But on which we see
Writing had faded.
“My first is of the
possessive of those
given to possession.
And my last, the finality
Of proposition
In entirety I give
That which in three worlds doth live.
Ungainly in the two’;
In all, long-legged beauty,
Much as you.”
Upon the paper which had come to fade
We strain to see
An ancient charade.
Can you decipher me?
Nope. I cannot decipher you. Don’t want to, actually. All the straining and fading and the ancient charade, not to mention the “finality of proposition that which in three worlds doth live” all strike me as pure blithering vatic nonsense. The first four lines are incredibly clumsy set up (go ahead, read them aloud), with random line breaks made worse by the first-word capitalization Mamet insists on.
I’d guess that these poems are larded with irony, of course. Whatever in the world isn’t these days? But irony comes in a mailed fist here, if it comes at all. There’s nothing remotely pleasurable here, no compelling concrete details, no convincing moments of wit. Of course in his prose Mamet is rarely funny. This is not necessarily a fault, but it does have a tendency to limit his range. We get lots and lots of dire “meaning” piled on with all the subtlety of plate tectonics.
Well, this is kind of close to The Universal almost being rescued by Wit:
Vermont, January
Lord of fire, God of the sword
Three hundred American dollars reward
Dog ran off yesterday afternoon
And I got to head down country soon.
God sent a Savior to cleanse our sins
And Jesus died for you and me
Bread and butter, bitters and gin
That we might sin with impunity.
The track of the plough around the pole
Cold bear sleeping in a snowy hole
The depth of the woods the lure of the fair –
Cassiopeia in her easy chair.
This is better than a lot of crappy poems I read – it kind of reminded me of a dyspeptic existential Ogden Nash. The final stanza made me smile with gratitude. But this is as good as it gets, and finally, it is just another massive Temple of Dire Significance. Notice the Divine references. God and Jesus aka Christ aka “a Savior” show up a lot in these poems, but I am not sure why. The mere presence of these words does, I suppose, imply that religious poetry is going on in some fashion. But mostly the Divine is used as a far too easy background over which Mamet can scribble down another fallen/depraved mankind foreground scene. Although my own religious sensibilities are so blighted and atrophied that I’m hard to offend, there’s something cheap about the pop-up Jesus and God and divine whatnots that managed to displease even my flinty little soul. Jesus seems to function as yet another “deep image” prop, like a stone or a bone or the sun or the cold pissing rain.
***
Mamet’s attempts at rendering nature are mostly off-the-shelf or simply inept. Here’s the opener for “The Pond at Twilight”:
Vast black crows in the smoke yard
Mock the hand that sowed the field.
Dry summer or cold spring
Leached color from the Pond
The White Sign said at twilight:
“Do not pursue me, for I flee.”
Incomprehensible, save we reflect
That it is not for Man.
Indeed, I’ll bet those crows are black. But how are they “vast”? Did he mean vast flocks? Or are these sci-fi giant Mothra vs. Godzilla crows? It doesn’t matter, really, because Nature here, as pretty much everywhere else in the book is merely used as a signifier for Yet More Deep Thoughts – note that the pond is the Pond and the man is Man. This could be meant to be ironic, I suppose, but so what? Taking it straight or with a wink and a nudge, this is still pretty poor stuff. The second stanza heightens the tension and cements the doleful Man/Nature comparison:
Not in pursuit of food
But in idolatrous and awkward
Folly called understanding,
Now the faro box, or Politics
Lends that compulsion:
And the urge to husband energy,
Warped from the fight for food,
Impels our self predation
As the deer on the pond, barking alarm,
Torn down by dogs,
Dies screaming like a bad impulse…
The deer barks at the dogs, dear reader. Maybe deer really do make barking-like sounds when under attack, but sometimes, Mr. Mamet, you just gotta ignore reality. And so both barking and screaming goeth the poor deer, and us too, so he tells us. And what’s with the faro box? Again, stop with the antique Billiards Room naughty pursuits! I guess I should be thankful they’re not playing whist. The Top Dog, no doubt, got a Cadillac. The second dog got a set of steak knives. The third dog got to keep his job…
Or, to use an old Robert Frost trope, sometimes poems, like a pat of butter on a hot stove, sizzle away on the melting of their own nonsense.
***
Now and again Mamet blunders into a fragment of real, actual, living poetry.
Billy the Weasel
the and now said billy the weasel
If I had thee by my side
What would I not joy to brave?
Four Hundred Pieces of a Scary Ride
As a whole, this is another one of Mamet’s gnomic toss-offs, but that last line is a killer fragment and I wish I’d written it (my highest compliment). He’d have sold twice as many copies of this book if he’d called the whole shebang “Four Hundred Pieces of a Scary Ride.” How echt-Mamet that sounds.
***
I’ll come clean: I did not read all of these poems. I didn’t read all of Jewel’s, Leonard Nimoy’s, Ally Sheedy’s or Suzanne Somer’s books of verse either. I wish celebrities, when they feel the need to express themselves outside their areas of expertise would pick on something other than poetry. Take up pottery, or glue together a stained glass window. The Chinaman is a beautifully printed clothbound book (nice work Overlook Press) that just takes up resources for something that might’ve been competent.
Of course David Mamet is not Suzanne Somers or Leonard Nimoy. He is a serious writer I truly admire (especially “Oleanna” and his script for the brilliant Paul Newman movie “The Verdict.”). What goes wrong here, I suspect, is that Mamet reads poetry that appears with depressing frequency in “The New Yorker” and “Poetry” magazine and he cringes at the attenuated little dabs of precious psycho-social metaphysics that characterize so many poems found there. So he’s going to toughen ups this spineless goo, by God, fix it up like another dumbo Hollywood script, and so he forges these iron nails and thumbscrews and bayonets in the Smithy of his Soul. The problem is, of course, that the hard-boiled has been boiled far too long, the elemental long since rendered down to the merely elementary. Poetry is difficult because the obvious stuff has all been done before, and done right into the ground for the most part. Or, as Randall Jarrell put it: “Writing good poetry is only occasionally difficult: usually it is impossible.”
And so, note to all celebrity poets (no matter how formidable and substantial your other accomplishments with the pen): poems, contrary to what you might think, are actually harder to write than novels, plays, screen-adaptations and political essays. They just are. That’s why there’s so few good ones out there.
March 2, 2016
My favorite poem in this slim collection is "Vermont, January" because of the sense of place and time that he gives the lines. Some were just too obscure for me (and I like to think that I am a reader who will make an effort for the writer). A mystery to me is the title poem. Oh, well. I tried.
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