Our Savage Art Page 3

  Rosanna Warren

  Rosanna Warren has a warm, classical sensibility (if she has a chip on her shoulder, it’s a chip of Greek marble); and some of her poems are an atlas of Greek temples, a phone book of Greek gods. Though Departure is her fourth book, her imagination is not highly distinctive—she does what a lot of other poets do, often a little better, sometimes a little worse. There’s a poem contemplating a Hellenistic head, poems about her dying mother, poems about gardening or a story by Colette or a landscape seen from a plane, even a poem that almost makes Boston a classical ruin (in a book that invokes the Iliad, it’s amusing to come across the lines “By beer bottles, over smeared / Trojans”).

  Warren has the disadvantage of being the daughter of two once well-known writers—when she mentions her father, it’s hard not to think, “But that’s Robert Penn Warren.” When her mother is ill, you’re tempted to cry, “But of course—Eleanor Clark.” Warren never drops names, but then she doesn’t have to. The children of writers must be aware that in their work biography intrudes more dramatically than for poets whose parents are anonymous.

  The poems about her mother’s last years ought to be among the most moving; yet, however carefully coddled, however dryly observed, they seem merely dutiful. Not dutiful toward her mother—dutiful toward poetry.

  Your purpled, parchment forearm

  lodges an IV needle and valve;

  your chest sprouts EKG wires;

  your counts and pulses swarm

  in tendrils over your head

  on a gemmed screen: oxygen,

  heart rate, lung power, temp

  root you to the bed—

  Magna Mater, querulous, frail,

  turned numerological vine …

  With that sudden nod toward grandiloquence, all the heart leaks out of the poem. The description is as good as such descriptions are, but with nothing stirring in the phrases—it’s life worked up into art; yet, while the strangeness of life has gone, the intensity of art has not arrived.

  The most curious work here is a series of translations from the notebooks of a young French poet, Anne Verveine, who disappeared while hitchhiking in Uzbekistan. The poems themselves are stale and unprofitable—they seem, like so many translations, just the translator wearing a different suit of clothes. At times the Frenchwoman sounds more like Warren than Warren. This would be unremarkable if Verveine were not completely imaginary. Having admitted as much in the notes, Warren oddly tricks her out with a dry biography (“She lived obscurely in Paris, avoiding literary society and working as a typographer”) and then smartly packs her off to her death.

  It’s hard to know what to make of this convoluted business. W. D. Snodgrass published a book of poems under the pseudonym S. S. Gardons (a cheerful anagram), making his alter ego a gas-station attendant. The British poet Christopher Reid, twenty years ago, published translations of an imaginary Eastern European poet named Katerina Brac—some readers were convinced she was real. In recent decades, there have been examples enough of literary imposture, authors winning awards by impersonating an Australian aborigine or a Jew who survived the Holocaust. Warren’s “translations” give no special insight into Paris or the lives of young women. It’s strange that she went to so much trouble.

  In her own poems, Warren uses all the right devices—similes, metaphors, allusions, lists—in a slightly mechanical way. Her favorite method of construction is a violent turn or peripeteia; but such swervings often seem nervousness, not nerve. What salvages this book of intelligent, well-meaning poems, most of them conventional as cottage cheese, are one or two that rise from some dark source even the poet seems unsure about:

  For six days, full-throated, they praised

  the light with speckled tongues and blare

  of silence by the porch stair:

  honor guard with blazons and trumpets raised

  still heralding the steps of those

  who have not for years walked here

  but who once, pausing, chose

  this slope for a throng of lilies:

  and hacked with mattock, pitching stones

  and clods aside to tamp dense

  clumps of bog-soil for new roots to seize.

  So lilies tongued the brassy air.

  This has the intensity missing elsewhere (the densities required by rhyme seem partly responsible). Whatever ritual the poet incanted, however she prepared for description so coolly rehearsed and a transcendence effortlessly reached some lines later, she ought to do it again and again.

  Howard Nemerov

  Howard Nemerov, who died in 1991 at the age of seventy-one, wrote dry philosophical poetry with an air of maundering discontent and surly introspection (you can almost smell the martinis being drunk). Though his Collected Poems (1977) won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, he never enjoyed a commanding critical reputation—sometimes as the honors pile up a poet’s reputation withers. Nemerov is doomed to be remembered for the accident of birth that made him the older brother of the photographer Diane Arbus.

  The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov is an honorable attempt to make a case for a connoisseur of margins and glooms, of grand illusions and middleclass mortgages. Nemerov came to poetry almost fully formed, for a long while writing pentameter so stiff it seemed to be wearing a neck brace:

  The dry husk of an eaten heart which brings

  Nothing to offer up, no sacrifice

  Acceptable but the canceled-out desires

  And satisfactions of another year’s

  Abscess, whose zero in His winter’s mercy

  Still hides the undecipherable seed.

  Abstractions were Nemerov’s best friends (and therefore worst enemies)—he could cram so many into a poem, they looked like frat boys stuffed into a phone booth. The language here has congealed into a diction and pace all too familiar in the thirties and forties (Yeats was responsible, but what for him was banker’s marble was linoleum for anyone else). Yet the lines above were published not in the forties but in 1960, just after Life Studies had made that style as out-of-date as a velocipede.

  Nemerov’s poems grew more colloquial as he aged, though he was never comfortable with what the age demanded (he roared against it like the last tyrannosaur), withdrawing into rote performance—like a singer forever giving his farewell concert, Nemerov perfected the dying fall. Misanthropes are agreeable enough, if you share their misanthropy (no one has ever founded a Misanthropes’ Club, because they’d murder each other trying to write bylaws). Nemerov’s poems suffered, not because they were forbiddingly deep or abstruse, but because he couldn’t end them without buttonholing the reader with stilted, crackjawed observations:

  To translate the revolving of the world

  About itself, the spinning ambit of the seasons

  In the simple if adamant equation of time

  Around the analemma of the sun.

  Was analemma really the best word available? A poet who wants above all to be taken seriously usually ends by pricing himself out of business.

  Though Nemerov managed to temper his bad habits (the passive constructions, the cholesterol of “to be” verbs, the curiously submissive speakers), he couldn’t avoid a moral coldness. Writing sourly of Christmas, he refers to the “alien priest / Who drenches his white robes in gasoline / And blazes merrily in the snowy East.” The image is appalling—irony has crossed into hatred. (If this is Vietnam, why the snow?) Two decades later, the poet writes of the Challenger disaster, “The nation rises again / Reborn of grief and ready to seek the stars; / Remembering the shuttle, forgetting the loom.” To end a poem of mourning with dreadful puns reveals a tone deafness that would have crippled even a great poet.

  The pleasures of reading Nemerov are fugitive and coarse (even in his grander poems something is withheld): a poet of bilious emotion and narrow technique is better off writing epigrams, where dyspepsia is a recommendation, even an advantage.

  Their marriage is a good one. In our eyes

/>   What makes a marriage good? Well, that the tether

  Fray but not break, and that they stay together.

  One should be watching while the other dies.

  The fondness here has been cloaked, but then misanthropes are often misanthropic because of a sentimental streak.

  A few war poems not included here, all published forty years after VJ Day, suggest the poet he might have become had he been willing to write more about the combat missions he flew in World War II. As belatedly as Anthony Hecht, he could have been an exception in a war where the best verse was written by men who did not see combat (Randall Jarrell, Richard Eberhart, Henry Reed). Nemerov was one of the most intelligent poets of his generation; yet, for all the austere and noble lines, his high-sounding phrases (and occasional low jokes), the verse is mostly dead to its language, as strewn with salt as the ruins of Carthage.

  Sherod Santos

  Sometimes a poet of whom the world has taken only minor notice begins to write more provocatively in middle age, as if it took decades to rub away the burrs of apprenticeship. (What remains is a glimmer of youth irretrievably lost, rather than the glare of youthful hubris.) Sherod Santos, a mild-mannered poet now in his midfifties, at first seems a bard of the suburbs, a poet of domestic certitudes and muted despairs (few Americans admit to being middle-aged; fewer confess to living in the suburbs—our prejudices are as shallow as the Great Salt Lake). In The Perishing, his idea of a wild time is waking to what sounds like a rain shower but turns out to be a neighbor’s sprinkler:

  Across the street, our recently widowed neighbor

  Had left her garden sprinkler on, its standing water

  Here and there welling up over the concrete curb

  In loose, collected rivulets of wet, a moon-lit runoff

  Less like spilled water than the dispossessing ghost

  Of water sluicing down the gutters and away.

  There’s nothing wrong with this, and nothing very right, either—it’s an instant well described, touched with the music of sadness and a twitch of regret, the sort of thing John Updike must do a thousand times in every novel. Santos loves such moments, which hover between sentiment and sententiousness. After a dozen of them you want to put your hand into a lawnmower blade.

  Not all Santos’s suburban poems hedge like hedge-clippers, as dull as a sack of mulch; but they love garden-variety transcendence almost as much as they’d love, say, Irish peat moss. Santos’s life doesn’t lend itself to drama (most lives don’t—they’d sell themselves to drama for pocket change). There are love poems of a dispiriting sort, homages to his wife’s naked body, things a mature poet can write almost without thinking, but with what Henry James called “finish.” Such poems live the way cakes do behind the plate-glass window of a bakery—they live in plaster.

  Many poets now write of domestic routines, which may take the adage “Write what you know” to the point of fallacy, or suicide. In the odd limbo of the suburbs, that zone once merely the spillage of city into country, now a center of its own, what’s lacking is intensity (many suburban poems seem muffled or padded). I can imagine the poems Larkin would have written had he lived in Levittown—they’d have been just as morose as those he wrote in Hull. Americans seem unable to catch the rage at the heart of Larkin’s verse. Perhaps as a country we’re not repressed enough.

  You have to go a long way in Santos to find the mildest fracture in his suburban pastoral; but then he’s another poet altogether. When he was thirteen, a woman entered his bedroom during a party and, opening her blouse, drew his hand first across her breast, then across her mastectomy scar. Instead of becoming a paean to an older woman’s beauty and need (the seduction that follows seems almost incestuous), the poem questions all the love he has known since. Santos has seen certain abysses and not drawn back from them.

  Most of the poet’s past work has been easy-going as conversation, colloquial as a coat of paint; but the new poems sometimes require a different register:

  When my father broke his family’s counsel

  And re-upped for the airlift into Germany,

  He stormed the black capital like Ecgtheow’s son,

  His tonnage downgraded to anthracite

  From Amatol and TNT, such payloads

  As custom still meted out to a city Grendeled

  In the underworld of incendiary smoke.

  This growls out Germanic myths like an Anglo-Saxon scop, the savage names—Amatol and TNT—sounding like Beowulf’s companions-in-arms. In half a dozen poems, Santos portrays a world the suburbs try to forget—the world where people starve, or are beaten and tortured.

  One evening, for the benefit

  Of three mothers who’d been summoned

  To watch through the open window

  Of a barber shop, a badly beaten

  Milicias youth was carried inside, stripped

  Of his clothes, and bound spread-eagle

  To a tabletop. They’d thought, at first,

  He might be the one-armed riverman’s son,

  The one who trapped chameleons

  He’d then sell for coins in the village square.

  That note of irrelevance, even of mild comedy, rescues what might remain of the human. Santos does not yet have Anthony Hecht’s brutality or grace; but, in a time when poems are more politicized than political, he accepts the homeliness of evil. If he sometimes makes his points too plainly (there’s an egregiously silly poem about dictators), if he doesn’t quite know how to finish what he’s started, beneath the surface of his tranquil suburban tracts something brutish has begun to stir.

  Carolyn Forché

  Carolyn Forche writes hushed, whispery, numinous lines, the kind that emerge from a blank page held over a candle flame. Blue Hour is ghost-ridden, stained with the salts of European poetry (Forche loves Desnos, Char, Jabes); and it’s possible to let her poems mesmerize you for a time.

  In the blue silo of dawn, in earth-smoke and birch copse, where the river of hands meets the Elbe.

  In the peace of your sleeping face, Mein Liebchen.

  We have our veiled memory of running from police

  dogs through a blossoming orchard, and another

  Of not escaping them. That was—ago—(a lifetime),

  but now you are invisible in my arms.

  Such death-hunted lines pay homage to half a century of poetry wounded into speech by Fascists, Nazis, Communists, and many a murderous government since. That poetry is inadequate to such politics is a commonplace: the tormented phrases of Paul Celan were almost a suicide note. That does not make the attempt to speak against injustice less noble, however ignoble most poems about politics are. Forche once wrote poems passionate with righteous (and self-righteous) anger; but, in her last book, The Angel of History (1994), she lost her taste for lyric or narrative and took up a style of tesserae and ostraka, Eliot’s “fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

  The Angel of History was an original work, pretentious and disturbing, opportunistic, vampirish, soiled in its own sorrows and everyone else’s. Forche’s new poems, if poems they are, continue this disjoint, fragmented manner in ways sometimes alarming. Blue Hour consists of eleven poems, ten short and one immensely long, less a poem than a shopping list of images. Her shorter pieces establish the atmosphere of, the sense of foreboding in, secrets kept and pain suffered. Forche wants to do something different from her contemporaries without sacrificing the beauty of lyric. (The death of the lyric is announced as often as the death of the novel, the press release usually read out by someone who wouldn’t know a lyric if it ate him.) What this means in practice is vague and portentous lines by the barrelful, lines whose gestures toward meaning are rhetorical nudges. When the poet writes, “An abandoned house, after all, will soon give itself back, and its walls become as unreadable as symbols on silk,” something beautiful has been said, but said in half-thoughts.

  That such partial, undecoded meanings are in essence religious is nowhere clearer than in the forty-pag
e poem that closes the book. The notes inform us that it is based on “Gnostic abecedarian hymns” that “date from the third century A.D.” These thousand lines are meant to render the last images passing through the mind of someone dying—that’s the dust jacket’s opinion (how it can tell, I’m not sure).

  bone child in the palm a bird in the heart

  bone-clicking applause of the winter trees

  bones of the unknown

  bones smoothed by water

  book of smoke, black soup

  born with a map of calamity in her palm

  A stanza of this is unsettling, a page tiresome, forty pages nearly unbearable agony. I don’t know if thoughts like these will pass through my mind as I die (though I hope not), but I’m sure they won’t pass through alphabetically. (I’ll probably be thinking of the unpaid gas bill and the cock I owe Asclepius.) I read every line, as a reviewer is obliged to do; and I must report that I shouted with delight when I got past the letter a. Whatever the gnostics saw in this form, it must have been one of the reasons they died out.

  Religions love to call tedium ritual, and I see advantages to using repetition to numb the chanter to the torments of his day. It’s hard to know what to make of such lines as a poem—you get snapshots of horror, fresh as the daily news; lines that hint at secrets, searches, refugees; and images that might have come from Freud’s secret dreams. It’s as if the poet had for a decade stored up surplus images in a carton and one night dumped them out and arranged them in alphabetical order. The problem with these contextless phrases is, not that they don’t let tragedy in, but that they don’t keep comedy out. This poem is the graveyard where unused lines go to die.