Contemporary American POETRY is like a radio that picks up only two stations. At one end of the dial there’s the raucous pop and shock-talk of the slam scene; at the other, the classical stuff of the academy streams forth. Between them there’s no dialogue, no common audience. At least that’s how the audiences themselves see it, as they tune in to the rival station just long enough to conclude that its songs all sound exactly alike — boring, lacking in either intellectual rigor or street-smart vigor.
In fact, however, there is an alternative station. Here, in their debut collections, young artists eagerly mix and remix the low with the high, the poetic with the prosaic, narrative flow with the integrity of the line. With its interplay between accessibility and obscurity, their work raises questions (rather than makes assumptions) about the kinds of knowledge readers might be expected to bring to any given poem — the inferences they’re asked to make, the context they must provide — as well as about the scope of the poets’ own knowledge of self and the world. Indeed, openness to question is precisely what separates these writers from the performance poets on the one hand — who lean more toward storytelling, stand-up routines, or demagoguery — and the scholars of postmodernism on the other, whose work too often involves nothing more than the rhetoric of theory or the theory of rhetoric. It’s this openness, as a form of hopefulness, that invites and may yet engage a crossover audience in a post-postmodern, post-ironic era.
Mary Szybist’s Granted (Alice James Books, 2003; $13.95) takes the world for anything but, as the poet longs so deeply but demands so little that longing per se seems a state of grace, a heartbreakingly lovely end in itself. Take her description of the act of description in "Swamp," in which a recognition of the link between naming and owning leads to a re-cognition of the named — a decision to liberate the subject from its captivity in language, and herself from the role of poet-as-captor; poetry, she suggests, is not found in an adult’s command of vocabulary so much as in a child’s grasp:
He points up at the moist branches and says
osprey, egret, swallow-tailed kite —
and I watch them eagerly, and I call to them
bird! bird! bird!
Or consider her prayer in "Raiment," not for beauty and the power it confers, but for vulnerability in the form of plainness and its own paradoxically attendant strength — namely, faith in the flowering world around her, whose "vast summer" serves as protective covering for a defenseless, drably plumaged self:
I want to be stripped and
scrubbed down the way
one would scrub
a dog. Then I want to
be the dog: faithful,
plain.
That this is a form of religious faith, this bright earthly backdrop a form of the God whom the narrator in turn, as bathed "dog," reflects, only becomes clearer as the book progresses. For instance, take the recurrent mirror image of angels and insects. When, in "Self-Portrait with a Bee in My Mouth," she speaks of the bee "abuzz inside me,/all wings, restless," we see that it is her being, her soul, that flutters so desperately within, just as she is the thing beating its wings in the mouth of the world, of God — which may be a fair description of the poetic voice itself, or at least of Szybist’s, no less iridescent for its fragility.
The similarly titled Given (Verse Press, 2002; $12), by Arielle Greenberg, is similar to Granted in no other way. If there is longing here, it is purely for something to long for; the "given" that Greenberg at once presents and resists is the relentlessness of change, to the extent that there is virtually no such thing as a thing, no object to which the subject can attach desire. The moon "becom[es] a burning door," the "night [is] not actually night," and "all the people are heaps of coal." Throughout the book, the narrator seeks one moment to catch change in action, then simply to confront the one constant that attends it — loss. In the poem "Soft Touch," she considers a lover who is indeed "touched" after having "once [been] hit by a playground":
"I want to call Cathy." And I would say, "But I am Cathy. I’m here. I’m your wife." And he’d say, swingset, "I know you are, but I want to call the other Cathy."....
Was I another Cathy? She became an oatmeal on my tongue, on his. Me. The other Cathy....
People get impacted by a game or a jungle gym or some other form of violence and when they wander away I see them. I guess they could be more angry, suddenly very sweet, or afraid of bridges. In love with a thing they never knew before. A slight shift is all it takes.
In such a precarious world, a slight shift rather takes it all, takes and undoes everything, which is precisely why it is so moving, in every sense of the word. Hope against hope, against such odds, for balance is what it is the poet’s job to offer. The collection is prefaced by a poem titled "Afterwards, There Will Be a Hallway." Describing this passageway, she says, "I am anxious at both ends"; one gets the sense that she is literally holding down the fort, guarding entrance and exit to this place that is no place in itself, but which may yet lead somewhere solid and real. The poet oversees our passage through it — this hallway that is the nowhere-land of the book. It ends with the lines "sea legs/come floating back to me," which themselves balance gingerly between hope and happenstance, a plea for and declaration of equilibrium in the midst of flux.
Richard Greenfield’s universe, as glimpsed in A Carnage in the Lovetrees (University of California Press, 2003; $16.95), is as disorienting as Greenberg’s and even more harrowing, above all for the fluidity of the boundaries between it and the open wound that is the self. Exterior floods interior, the subjective bleeds into the objective, and the individual begins to disintegrate, as in "Device for the Blind":
He awoke in the tent to thunder.
He couldn’t see a thing in there except for the glow of a wristwatch.
Was he camped on the border between? Forget it.
The wind inflated the nylon room, the water seeped through the
seams.
Morning, nude in the river of snowmelt, the sugary purl at the sur-
face brought him in.
Out in the middle, he was sinking, he was dismantling the machine
that had held him in place, within the blank among other things,
tearing out the bright wires and then the motherboard.
Birds chirped hysterically.
Yet, for Greenfield, each moment of the poet’s disintegration is the moment of another poem’s birth; the carnage of the collection’s title is his raw material, the blanks in him are filled with language, the device for his own blind spots is the poetic one of imagery: "I am supplying the words to a null in time, to the space between clarity and hallucination." Greenfield’s book overturns the platitude "What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger" to imagine that, perhaps, what does virtually kill us — life itself — makes us stronger, "accomplished among the rest of the wreckage." Speaking for those to whom that is not a paradox, his work still speaks compellingly to those of us who are willing to follow the broken lines of poetic logic.
Greenfield’s allusion to the relationship between man and machine in the above excerpt finds an echo in Timothy Donnelly’s Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove Press, 2003; $14). Donnelly, in his inimitably witty, linguistically vigorous style, considers what makes us us, what animates us, moves us, and turns us on, as in "Sonata Ex Machina":
The desired machine plays the smallest
sonata possible, an arrangement of gastro-
intestinal blips, and this only at night when the
program at night when the program skips....
The desired machine
will start itself and stop itself, will fuel itself
and fuck itself. It will right itself when thrown
off-kilter, and it will even change its own
damn filter. It would make itself if it had to, but it don’t.
The question becomes whether our most human faculty, desire, itself dehumanizes us and thwarts self-determination. Both book and poem’s titles imply that desire renders us minor players in our own lives, lives with programmatic outcomes:
What are the traits that delineate the human?
I am not my own machine.
Donnelly’s poetry, then, explores the process of renegotiating the terms of his desire — whereby the act of owning desire is its own form of fulfillment, liberating where the desire simply to own enslaves.
[B]eauty haunted us, admit it — that it moved us, brought us back
beneath a happiness, that place where we could call
something beautiful and not mean and, moreover, mean it.
In Zirconia (FenceBooks, 2001; $12), meanwhile, Chelsey Minnis doesn’t explore that process so much as inhabit it, like a skin. In this excerpt from "Uh," the poet, at once force and freak of nature, dominatrix and urchin, self-dramatist and dreamer, gives shape through her signature use of conjunctions and ellipses to the imaginative space between will and world, declaration and denial, between the two meanings of want — desire and lack:
..uh.........I want to wear hot pants......................................................
.............................................................................................................
..............................................................and rest my boot on the back
of a man’s neck....................................................................................
.............................................................................................................
.............................................................................................and.........
......................................................................take a sharp cane.........
.................and.............stick my heart...................like...a piece of trash
..........in a park....................................................................................
................and..............................................................................................................................................................................................
.............................................................................................................
rise out of arctic waters with curled icicles in my hair and a speargun
.............................................................................................................
.............................................................................and.........................
.........buy a lazy game cat with claws...........that scratch me.............
.......................................................and.............................uh!.............
Minnis’s periods suggest a repetition of closure as much as any lingering pause — an insistence upon letting go of her every last wish as much as a conjuring of the next. Thus they mark the means and ends, the meanings and endings, of hope. Reading her work is as easy as accidentally tuning into a skewed frequency — and then choosing to stay with it.
Ruth Tobias can be reached at ruthiet@bu.edu
