by Marion K. Stocking

Beloit Poetry Journal, Summer 2007

In 1950, when the BPJ was new, critics divided the poetry turf between the wild men and the academics—the "raw and the cooked." Our 1957 chapbook contrasted the formally conservative British "Movement" poets like Amis and Larkin with our West Coast "Underground" like Orlovitz and Bukowski. Today the "schools" are somewhat different. David Lehman, writing of the New York School, contrasts their avant-garde "linguistic engines" with the "repositories of felt experience" of other poets. I'd like here to explore that distinction.

To represent those poets who create "repositories of felt experience" I'll start with Galway Kinnell, whose new volume, Strong Is Your Hold (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006, 69 pp, $25 hardbound) comes with a CD of the poet reading the entire book, with welcome introductory comments as if for a live audience. I especially enjoy hearing the little revisions from the published text that appear to emerge spontaneously in performance.

Many of these new poems at first suggest Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquility." "Pulling a Nail" enacts literally extricating a nail, well implanted by the speaker's taciturn father, which precipitates his recollections of that difficult relationship. The physical action goes internal at the end to an emotional but powerfully ambivalent conclusion where the nail emerges bent, "forming a little wobbling / bridge between then / and now, between me and him, / or him and me, over which / almost nothing of what mattered / to either of us ever passed." Emotion here is conjured through recapitulating the physical and psychological process of pulling that nail. The things poetry can do!

Strong in this book is Kinnell's kinship with other poets, especially Whitman—the source of the title: "Tenderly—be not impatient, / (Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, / Strong is your hold O love)." Also strong is his absorbed attention to the natural world. I am much taken with "Everyone Was in Love," in which the small children come in to their parents naked and draped with amazingly acquiescent garter snakes. The image delicately suggests an erotic Eden where a tree of wisdom replaces the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, where Noah's ark accepts the condition that snakes eat frogs. The children, like their poet father, take no sides in the predator/prey relationship; they are at home in the natural world. A few of the domestic poems in this volume seem to me uneven, but all the nature poems are solidly fine. For me the strongest of these is "The Quick and the Dead," in which Kinnell attends to the process of carrion beetles burying the body of a dead vole. The poem progresses from its shuddering question of whether there is "a resolution worse than death, after death" to a cheerfully sober acceptance of the natural processes of mortality.

"The Quick and the Dead" shows that, unlike Wordsworth, Kinnell does not necessarily put time between his spontaneous emotion and the tranquility of composition. Indeed, tranquility might be an inappropriate response. I was astonished when, amid the immediate panic reaction to what is now simply "9/11," his "When the Towers Fell" appeared in The New Yorker. How seamlessly Kinnell blends Villon, Celan, Aleksander Wat, Whitman, and Hart Crane into one voice, outraged at injustice and inhumanity while deflecting any perverse "pride" in feeling that this nation had been uniquely afflicted. (For this volume the quotations are translated in the notes and on the CD.) The poem opens with the authority of the poet who lives where the towers were part of the daily scene, who "grew so used to them / often we didn't see them, and now, / not seeing them, we see them." He then proceeds to a counterpointing of scenes in which he imagines being at work in the World Trade Center that morning with vignettes of what he himself saw, coming immediately back to town as he did to meet with students. The voices of other poets connect this disaster to the human history of outrage. Lines from Celan's "Death Fugue" introduce Kinnell's image of the towers that "come before us now not as a likeness, / but as a corollary, a small instance in the immense / lineage of the twentieth century's history of violent death."

It is my sense that only a poet who has spent a lifetime crafting words to express what he observes and experiences—be it pure familial joy, the minutiae of the natural world, or (back to Wordsworth) "man's inhumanity" to his own species—only such a sustained discipline of attention and imagination could produce a poem so rich and accurate so soon after the event. Emotion recollected in tranquility may inspire other poets to cope with the trauma of the destruction of the towers, but I'd be surprised if they can match the power of Kinnell's immediate response. Those who wonder, beyond the television images, "What was it really like?" and, beyond the political rhetoric, "What did it really mean?" can look here for an answer.

* * *
Harryette Mullen's first book, Tree Tall Woman, got pigeonholed as "identity poetry" in the voice of a literate black woman. Though Mullen widens her audience in successive books, she fortunately carries the wealth of her black and female identities throughout Recycylopedia (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2006, 190 pp, $15 paper), which reprints her second volume, Trimmings, and the two that follow, S*PeRM**K*T and Muse & Drudge. In a useful "Poetic Statement" in Rankine and Spahr's American Women Poets in the 21st Century, Mullen provides me with my transition from Kinnell's "repositories of felt experience" to the "linguistic engines" of much of today's experimental poetry. She says, "I think of writing as a process that is synthetic rather than organic, artificial rather than natural, human rather than divine." She continues, "My inclination is to pursue what is minor, marginal, idiosyncratic, trivial, debased, or aberrant in the language that I speak and write." In her preface to Recyclopedia, "Recycle This Book," she describes Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T as "serial prose poems that use playful, punning, fragmented language to explore sexuality, femininity, and domesticity." They correspond to the "Objects" and "Food" sections of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. Read her title as Supermarket and/or Sperm Kit and you're off, ready for the games.

I'll talk my way through the first poem in Trimmings and then you're on your own.

Becoming, for a song. A belt becomes such a small waist.
Snakes around her, wrapping. Add waist to any figure,
subtract, divide. Accessories multiply a look. Just the thing,
a handy belt suggests embrace. Sucks her in. She buckles.
Smiles, tighter. Quick to spot a bulge below the belt.

I know I'm missing things in here (Mullen does not expect any reader to get every play), and I may well be making connections the poet hadn't anticipated, but that's part of the exhilaration of the game. Remember Coleridge's praise of Wordsworth: when he used a word it meant everything it could mean. Becoming. OK, we're in the process. Ah, but an article of clothing may be becoming to the wearer. And something in the story is coming. Oops! Coming in which sense? On to for a song. Both a song for what's coming and the belt that was bought cheap? And the belt becomes, isn't just becoming to, the small waist. Handy gets anticipatorily physical. Then snakes. Yes indeedy, our old friend from Genesis. And isn't he rapping? A black snake, seductive? Add hints at a pun in waist, compounded by subtract, divide—all specific to the effect of a tight belt. Along comes multiply, with multiple connotations, one of which rears its head in the last line. But first accessories, both those added fashion details and—dare we read it?—partners in crime. What do they multiply? Well, a fashion "look" and also a gaze? Just the thing suggests the voice and intentions of the wearer as well as the Steinian thingyness of the object. OK? And the possible connotations of suck? Now we're getting down to it. The poem seems to start as objective narrative but is actually dramatic. Especially in tighter, its effect is physical and psychological, climaxing in the last three words, which renew the cliché. This intimate theater pushes Stein's tender buttons, evoking, for example, "Aider, why aider why whow, whow stop touch, aider whow, aider stop the muncher, muncher munchers." In S*PeRM**K*T Mullen's satire of commercialized produce scours the supermarket with mass-produced clichés: "Refreshing spearmint gums up the words. Instant permkit combs through the wreckage. Bigger better spermkit grins down family of four. Scratch and sniff your lucky number. You may already be a wiener."

An epigraph to Muse & Drudge from Callimachus defines the familiar feminist dilemma: "Fatten your animal for sacrifice, poet, but keep your muse slender"—the traditional irony of woman as inspiration and exploitable (sex)worker. The language in this volume is richer than in the prose poems, effervescing with fractured syntax, neologisms, and multiple puns. Mullen's declared aim is like Wordsworth's "renewal of words," though this is hardly Wordsworth's palaver. Consider "he dictate so dicty, she sedate so seditty," followed by a stanza that sings the blues. She puns ever more lavishly: "his penis flightier than his word." She jams words together so that they overlap wonderfully: apocalypso, then a triple overlap, "hysteriotypist."

Mullen divides each poem into four quatrains, suggesting a song. In her preface she writes that she "imagined a chorus of women singing verses that are sad and hilarious at the same time." I'd sure like to hear it. The voices are usually disjunctive. I wickedly imagine that if I were to put each quatrain on a three-by-five card and keep reshuffling them into groups of four I'd have an endless supply of zingy associations. Even on the formal page it is up to me to create new connections. Here's one stanza:

mutter patter simper blubber
murmur prattle smatter blather
mumble chatter whisper bubble
mumbo-jumbo palaver gibber blunder

Start off "mother father sister brother," and see how far you get, beyond the crazy delicious music of it. A family all talking at once as in an Altman film? Or just a poet drunk on language. Note the vertical rhymes, alliterations, and assonances; read it crosswise or up and down: a magic square, with the three-syllable palaver extending and focusing the last line. A delight machine.

Beyond the heightened diction and prosody, Mullen extends the elements of her earlier texts—sexuality, femininity, and domesticity—while satirizing the seductive commercialism that controls them. Love her for her ludic genius—loopy, ludicrous, liberating—and for her increasingly rich and playful juggling of black diction, syntax, music, and tradition. It is a gift to have these three books, these eloquent "linguistic engines," together.

* * *
The next step out is to Ben Lerner's first volume, The Lichtenberg Figures (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2004, 53 pp, $14 paper). Eighteenth-century polymath Georg Christoph Lichtenberg discovered the pattern of outwardly exploding dendritic forms where lightning strikes, figures that suggest the commanding electrical energy that informs these poems. (Copper Canyon provides a stunning cover illustration for this elegantly designed volume.) The first of Lerner's fifty-two untitled fourteen-line "sonnets" establishes the connection/disconnection: "Real snow / on the stage. Fake blood on the snow. Could this go / / on forever in a good way? A brain left lace from age or lightning." We have here a twenty-four-year-old poet whose ludic genius is unintimidated by the ludicrous. He romps in the English language, sometimes shooting down cliché after cliché through syllepsis such as we haven't seen since Alexander Pope:

I did it for the children. I did it for the money.
I did it for the depression of spirit and the cessation of hope.
I did it because I could, because it was there.
I'd do it again. Oops, I did it again.
....
Let's just do Chinese. Just do as I say. Just do me.
That does it. Easy does it. That'll do.

The play is not all on the surface. Among phrases one could hear any day at the next table in the coffee bar comes "the depression of spirit and the cessation of hope," throwing a dark shadow in under all the stylistic glitter. Remember that "brain left lace from age or lightning." Not funny. And as you read, watch out for couplets like "If it is any consolation, we admire the early work of John Ashbery. / If it is any consolation, you won't feel a thing." Strong currents beneath these surfaces.

Lerner's second book, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon, 2006, 127 pp, $15 paper) is a stunner. I could use all my pages here to explore the ramifications in form, intertextuality, and intellectual pioneering of any one of these five sequences. I have spent a good week, a very good week, rereading and mining this remarkable volume, but I (the critic Lerner keeps wryly referring to?) don't expect to exhaust its riches. Part I, "Begetting Stadia," offers seven short poems, the first, with its fourteen lines, a wave back at the sonnets in his first book:

Demands indefinitely specified,
demands incompatible with collective living

beget stadia
with indefinite seating
delicately tiered.

Resembling its shape
and therefore suggesting its function:

a wave.

Or repeating its shape
and therefore undoing its function:

a wave,

which I will here attempt to situate
in the broader cognitive process
of turning the page.

The opening lines, with their cagy suggestion of indeterminacy, alert the reader to the tension between individual and collective action and in their abstraction introduce the primary action of the book as a whole, which is cerebral. No red wheelbarrow, buzzing fly, rolled trousers, or burying beetles here. "Think about it."

In an online interview (called to my attention by a review in Verse by Ashley David) Lerner has said that "the ability to enact the experience one describes is, I think, a hallmark of a great writer." (Sotto voce: It is also the hallmark of the Romantic ode.) Although overt action erupts in the last line, the reader must accept the challenge that all these poems are really staged in the theater of the intellect. The academic diction (parodied, no?) of cognitive process wittily begets not only those indefinite stadia but realizes the action in the prosody of six lines that enact, then reenact, the image of the wave. (Ninety-six pages later the reader is back in the stadium, caught up in the wave.) In these tightly lyric free-verse constructions, Lerner invites us to enjoy throughout the volume the constantly shifting relationship of shape to function. When you get your own copy, look at the sound patterning of the poem beginning "We call it sports entertainment," admire the dramatic lineation, the yawing diction ("in the collective economy / of variable stars"), listen at the end to the narrative voice modulating from comic self-conscious to formal historical ("Am I not then entitled to") and concluding with an iambic pentameter couplet of which Frost might be proud. These poems may well be "linguistic engines," but those engines are fueled by lyric energy and conducted by one whiz of an engineer.

Sections II and IV are "Angle of Yaw." Sailors know that to yaw is to swerve suddenly, as in a squall. Aviators and astronauts understand it as a turning about a vertical axis. One of these poems deals directly with the aeronautical, but, as the book's title would imply, there are syntactic and intellectual swerves throughout the work. Everything in motion, but unpredictably. I'm going to yaw for the moment to Section III, "Didactic Elegy," five substantial poems in irregular stanzas. Here's how it opens: "Intention draws a bold, black line across an otherwise white field. / Speculation establishes gradations of darkness / where there are none, allowing the critic to posit narrative time. / I posit the critic to distance myself from intention, a despicable affect. / Yet intention is necessary if the field is to be understood as an economy." Follow that? I assume intention is despicable because, scientifically, it implies teleology. Then I realize that the word emotion never appears in this work, only the clinical affect. This is (aha!) poetry in a 180-degree yaw from "romantic" passion into the passion of art. The fifth stanza ends, "Can this process be made the subject of a poem?" Drop down to the next stanza and find: "No, / but it can be made the object of a poem." Slithery words, subject and object. Tum the page and confront this:

Events extraneous to the work, however, can unfix the
       meaning of its figures,
thereby recharging it negatively. For example,
if airplanes crash into towers and those towers collapse,
there is an ensuing reassignation of value.

With this new figure (not a subject or object) I am busily reassigning my attention. I begin to feel at home in the rhythmic structure of the poem and to read hungrily for the next yaw. And the next. I finish the poem profoundly engaged and ready for my next three or four readings. At this stage I am taking the elegy to be for the towers, the critic to be the one who is responding to the image of the towers' falling (i.e., as on film, as a work of art). The poet's didactic lecture is delivered in a series of interlocking questions and aphorisms ("Should we memorialize the towers or the towers' collapse? / Can any memorial improve on the elegance of absence? / Or perhaps, in memoriam, we should destroy something else.") The lecture, then (back to the artist's black-on-white line), seems to be on the integrity of art. But don't take this critic's word for it, since every rereading waves me into new configurations.

Section V carries the provocative title "Twenty-One Gun Salute for Ronald Reagan"—twenty-one seven-line stanzas, each followed by an indented couplet. Some are dictionary definitions for which the player must identify the word defined ("Minute hooks fasten to a corresponding strip with a surface of uncut pile"). Some sport with Lerner interviews ("I want the form to enact the numbing it describes"). Some are just bitterly, if comically, absurd ("I would shoot myself only in self-defense"). Some sound as though Reagan or G. W. Bush might have said them, on or off the record ("This is your tax dollars hard at work," "I neither regret nor recall my presidency"). Some are openly historical ("Proceeds from the arms sales were then funneled to the Contras"), some slyly political ("A diamond cheval-de-frise tops the White House"). I'll end with the final line of the volume: "Is this thing on?" Damn right it's on.

* * *
For full disclosure I must add that after I'd selected these books to exemplify two poles of contemporary poetry I was astonished and delighted to discover that not only had the BPJ been the first to publish Galway Kinnell, in 1952 when he was twenty-five, but we were also the first to publish Ben Lerner, in 1997, when he was still a teenager. The distance in age between Kinnell and Lerner is greater than that between Shelley and Thomas Hardy, the difference in their poetry even greater. Since from the beginning it has been a primary aim of this magazine to discover the growing tip of poetry, it gives me intense pleasure that we have been able to say to these radically different poets what Emerson said to Whitman: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career."

About the Author
Marion K. Stocking was Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal from 1954 to 2003, and continues to serve BPJ as Editor for Reviews and Exchanges.

Beloit Poetry Journal

Editors: John Rosenwald, Lee Sharkey
Editor for Reviews and Exchanges: Marion K. Stocking