"The Vise" by Mary Baine Campell

Mary Baine Campbell's poem "The Vise" seems to be a missive from a soul who cannot get out of Plato's Cave. This nameless one must have done especially offensive to warrant being gripped in a vise rather than merely chained to the wall of the cavern. But it seems the same old punishments, the same tortures and teases, all those fleeting signifiers in front of him (or her), forcing all the senses onto to one set of appearances (and appearances only) so that they have to construct an idea of the world outside the cave, free of the vise, a faith, so to speak, that this vise that holds the head is exactly where it should be, doing what it must do to whom it is doing it in the framework of an infinitely larger universe, multiverse, omniverse, what have you, that is unseen. Or it might be something else entirely, such as a description of being dead, with the world burning and eroding and washing away with the monsoon as described. This may well be a poem of a great journey that starts at death and ends when a soul has reached the other side, a particular culture's conception of an afterlife. 

The wind, from which the head cannot shield itself from, blows over the face and whisks along whatever has turned to dust back into the unmade earth. To be honest, I haven't the foggiest what Campbell is getting at here, other than to describe the quality of being dust in the wind, but this is plainly too obscure and mannered for me to even care. It used to be that I thought it was cool to be mysterious and cool and utterly and completely baffling with my writing, but hey, I was fifteen at the time and reading too much Dylan and Jim Morrison and the cursed share of Kerouac, and it took me years to learn to stop being abstruse by design and instead become interesting by intent. That might have happened when I finally got something to write about, some comprehensible subject matter, which I managed to link up with a credible language, a combination that created whatever mystery I sought. The abstract quality is a result of writing well about something, not writing syntactically challenging pieces in a mistaken notion of what cubist writing might sound and read like. Campbell's poem is well structured, the language clean, spare, exacting to the the objects and their qualities, but this is just too much to put together beyond saying that it seems to be out funerals, death, and the perspective of the deceased once they've left this life, observant yet powerless to intervene in the affairs of the living . There is that odd mix of regret and acceptance that mingles in the images. There's a feeling of loss that pervades the stanzas, and a feeling of powerlessness that there is nothing one can do with what is slipping from their grasp, whether youth or life itself.

There exists here a tangible feeling that the narrator is in some fixed place of observation, taking it all in, motionless and unable to speak or intercede on behalf of the world; I took this too mean that the speaker had died and was in some astral place, perhaps from a cloud, maybe from a closet as a ghost as yet unseen, because the imagery Campbell have a museum quality, implying gold ornamentation, fruits, things one employs in funeral preparations from an unspecified culture and time. Norman Mailer's quizzical and enthralling Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings which deals quite a bit with the cult of the dead, reincarnation, and has a good amount of description of funeral preparation, all of which this poem brought to mind. But I do see the other side, the observations of one getting older who is so much wiser and suffers the eventual regrets of bad decisions, missed opportunities, consequential expressions of arrogance and pride that cannot be undone, and how all this comes to the eventual acceptance that everything in our view is somehow as it must be in the larger pattern we can only faintly imagine.

I don't want to say that this is a bad poem since I keep re-reading it to puzzle it out a bit more. Unless it's from the pen of the insanely overrated and over cited--Kerouac, Neruda, Bukowski--insert your own pet peeve here-- a bad poem does not stay long in my thinking, and it is the easiest thing to pass on, like beer. Life is too short to deal with wooden, cryptic, stick-in-the-mud language. Campbell's work has it's attractions, and I would say her minimalism succeeds to the degree that The Vise gets more than one going over. Death, though, seems to be the operative idea here--as you say, and to paraphrase crudely, life may be good and pleasantly cushioned for our narrator, but there is a defeated tone to the words, a sense that one's comfort is also one's manacle around the neck. Maybe it's the sense of defeat that puts me off about this--I am of the notion that one shouldn't require anything of a poet other than to be interesting and their work to be nothing other than good, ie, worth reading--but the lack of rage here is vaguely troubling:

It is not

That the world is unkind.

Kind hands once touched

My lips and eyes

To say whatever such

Touches say.

And every day

A spoon, laden

With softer gold

Of honey

Spilling

Forces me

I would want more of a rage against the stasis, the sterility of the apparent perfection of this flesh and blood life; I would read the above lines as being something of a junkie's reverie as he nods into whatever oblivion he seeks through the needle and the spoon. Every care and dread is dissolved as a slowly corrosive bliss overtakes the body and the spirit that attends to it. But this may be exactly what Campbell sought to get across in her tightly sealed stanzas, that being alive is filled with it's own kind of death, our material and mental blockades to the world, save for a noise, a chime of a phone, a flash of light in the sky at dusk that reminds us of the churnings outside the body and its republics of dulled sensation:

From all directions

Lightning tells us

What is lost

Or burnt

In the collapsing

World.

The nod produces its own ceremonial Edens from which the glance of old archetypes, readings from the nursery or a junior college textbook are conflated in a shifting illusion that replaces the substance of one's history, objectified into notions of the weather taking a personal care

of the layabout's bedding:

Tonight, a monsoon.

The diamond-fall of rain

Bruises my face

Washes honey

From it, and

All else.

This is all that can be seen, that can be comprehended through the suggested splendor or comfort the narrator cryptically speaks from, and so the poem may be ironic in that we have veiled comments emanating from what are already a veiled, not the least blinded sense of reality, and what is maddening for me is the acceptance that the speaker suggests as to what their situation is, hazy as it is. Although there is a chance that Campbell intended our subject to be alive as they recited their spare vistas, it suggests ritualized death all the same, a ceremony of surrender:

But in the vise

I can still stare --

Through brilliant

Obliterations of storm --

At what is

Still there.

USED BOOKS: A Multitude of Sins

A Multitude of Sins
stories by Richard Ford(Vintage)

Currently finishing A Multitude of Sins, a collection of short stories by Richard Ford. He has the strained relations between men and women falling in and out of love with one another nailed, better than anyone since John Cheever, with a prose that is flawlessly crafted and deeply felt in its economy . Richard Ford is an extraordinarily gifted prose writer whose control of his style is rare in this time of flashy virtuosos , ala Franken and DF Wallace or Rick Moody, whose good excesses run neck-and-neck with their considerable assets. Ford, in his The Sports Writer, Indendepence Day, and certainly in this collection of Multitude of Sins, understands his strengths in language and advances , seemingly, only those virtues in his work. He obviously understands the lessons of Hemingway , and wisely chooses not imitate: rather, the words are well chosen.

For the more poetic language of simile and metaphor, The Cheever influence is clear; the imagery to describe the detail make those details resonate profoundly, as in the last story "Abyss", without killing the tale with a language that's too rich for the good of the writing. His writing is quite good, although the shadow of Hemingway dims the light of his own personality. Ford seems as if he’s made peace with the gloomy and morose code of honor and betrayed idealism that is said to the heterosexual male’s stock and trade. But maybe not just peace; it’s as if he’s cut a deal with the emotional sagging age brings upon his brow, and he cherishes each sour taste and resonating resentment to give his brooding prose the feeling of being more than cleverly disguised metaphors simulating the moral dissolution of a grown man’s sense of situated-nests.

"The Names" by Joe Wilkins

Someone is in a bar, having a long neck Budweiser as they look across the dark room, past the floating dust particles highlighted from glaring light from the street, talking past the person they're talking to, summarizing the state of the economy, the community, their own slice of a wretched existence, and conclude with what is they're willing to settle for. "It is no good to grow up hating the rich" warns B.H.Fairchild, to which our monologist, a persona who had read this quote somewhere and found a space in a conversation he was having to both cite the reading and to respond , responds thusly to an undifferentiated Pete, a name that in the course of this story never takes on a personality. He might as well be a mirror for this beer soaked gripes to spoken to:

Why not hate the rich? It's easy,
and some days easy's what I need.

This is speech from a Larry McMurtry novel or one of those films where a minor character suddenly becomes very chatty in a key scene and finds an articulate voice and give us the complications of his life and world view in a writer's attempt to give him more complexity, and as a speech it might work fine given the context and narrative conventions fiction or a movie would allow. It might not seem so, let us say, incredible and contrived. It's a splendid thing when a piece composed of a character's voice works, with the precarious balance between natural , loose cadences and digressive tendencies and a writer's control of the idea , in getting it across for an effect without showing his hand, but Joe Wilkens ' tone here is Hollywood production.

There is one thing for someone in theater to go off on a soliloquy in the presence of another actor , since good stage writing and direction can effectively imply that we've entered the character's more resonant thinking for a few beats; the lights come up again, the other actor recites his line, and the plot continues apace. We have no such context in "The Names".

The other person this narrator is assumed to be talking to is insufficiently established , and the notion that these are the private considerations doesn't convince me either, since this poem strains between being a rambling string of anecdotes and a polemic. One can’t imagine this kind of conversation happening in a bar where the working poor gather ; Pete, if he were a kindred spirit in this narrator’s peer group, would competing for the spotlight himself with a competing monologue, another list of complaints and ready lines. Even in commiseration there is competition, a competition to out bottom and out –bad luck the guy you’re sitting next to. But here, the fix is in, and this is what ruins the fidelity to describing experience that is intractably tragic.The thoughts are too complete, too polished. Someone with this kind of insight, or at least this ability to artfully phrase his details, ought to be able to do better than wallow in his own disappointment:

This country I call home is, like yours,
lost, and my people too are lost, like me,

so let me hate with them, let me sit up at the bar,
and curse the banker, the goddamn-silly-designer chaps
the new boss man from back east wears,
let me speak the names of the dead and get righteous,
for at least one more round.

The writing shows, the urge to totalize a context. Wilkens doesn’t show the moment as much as gives it shape with conventional writerly moves.Barroom bathos, a country singer's stoicism, a poem that seems more like something emerging from Central Casting than coming across as something made from things that one might actually have heard or had seen. Over rehearsed is the phrase for this, with the small town details arranged in such a circuitous way that they unintentionally expose what "The Names" actually is, a tall tale to flesh out Wilken's sarcastic reversal of Fairchild's one-sentence quote. It's a lot of work for so little effect.

Bo Diddley, RIP

Pioneer rock and roll genius Bo Diddley has died at age of 79. Along with Chuck Berry, Diddley was a musician who had the very rare opportunity to create a new kind of music. Shave and hair cut rhythm, chunky guitar swipes, a street wit, a bellowing voice of desire, his was the sound of inevitability; you didn't know what was coming exactly, but you could hear it and you couldn't stop it.

Hey, Bo Diddley, RIP

Yes, I bought a damn cell phone

I long refused to get a cell phone and preferred rather to rage at the yakking philistines who couldn't stand silence in public places like bus stops or airline terminals, nor be bothered to bring a book or a magazine with them if they knew they might be alone at some period in the day, between stations, with no one to confirm how bitchen they were. It was a satisfying arrangement; overworked and underpaid and yet with so much unfulfilled promise that I could barely speak when my anger welled up like some dystopic stew blowing off the oppressive lid, my contempt for cell phones and the tech-addicted jerks who diluted the language with the odious devices was just the thing one needed to get a psychic leg up in the world.

I was smarter, I was old school, I revered books and the words printed on them by great writers who took their mission seriously, I cherished meditative quiet and loathed boorishness, I was a man of the ages (or at least the Seventies), I was an arrogant jerk. Arrogant and a jerk, yes, but it fed my ego, made up for whatever perceived failures I might have brooded over and over as the years wore on. The thinking was that for all the shortcomings and defects of character and amends that have been a part of my story, and for all the spasmodic awkwardness of getting my life back together, I at least had integrity and maintained a standard of using words carefully. I spoke only when I had things to say, and that I wouldn't indulge in an appliance that would, for a fee, indulge the prolix demon that lay dormant inside me. I had a home phone with an answering machine, and I would well wait until the end of the day to listen to who wanted to speak to me and why; if I needed to make a call en route somewhere, I could always use a pay phone.

Always use a payphone. Things change incomprehensibly when you're not paying attention, and came the time I needed to make one of those calls from a pay phone, none was to be had. There used to be two pay phones at the gas station next to the bus stop where I catch my bus to work. One morning, I needed to call and tell them that the bus was running late. I turned to where the phones were and noted that one had been missing, and the other had a smashed receiver dangling from the end of the phone cord. It would have made a great photo urban reality, an example of all the shiny things of the recent past becoming obsolete, smashed, useless and lacking even design virtues for one to consider in self-satisfied repose. Or maybe it was self-deluded repose.

All the integrity and class and hard won soulfulness I assumed I'd garnered by refusing on principle to be reachable virtually anywhere, at anytime, benefited me not at all. I stood there in the familiar raging powerlessness, staring where there used to be two perfectly operating phones. It was all I could manage not to fall into that abyss that seemed to suddenly appear just below my belt line, a gaping chasm of nothingness and undirected Being. It was dread, nausea, the whole anxious existential moment Kierkegaard fretted about with such vituperative relish. All this to say that I was annoyed unto death that I couldn't make a phone call when I needed to with the pay phones that were formally available with an Eden-like convenience. One ought not to have been surprised, or feigned the indignation of being caught short, as I had noticed the shells of old payphone booths dotting the city blocks from the lower to the higher economic sections of the city; gas stations, 7-11 stores, strip malls were having the pay phones removed, leaving an acceptable scarring on the building sides where they formally waited to be used, abused, bashed with hammers and spray-painted with gang graffiti. Like some of us, I never considered the world to change this close to the route I take to and from work every day. There was sufficient warning, my senses were not addled, I wasn't unaware of what would need to be done sooner or later. Sooner, though, comes sooner than you think.Meanwhile, a mixed clutch of exchange students drifted toward the curb as the wayward bus finally emerged in the horizon. It then approached the red painted curb, every other one of them rambling with a dead pan earnestness in the narrative tongue into cell phones wedged between shoulder and tilted head while they fumbled for bus passes or exact change. Doubtless, whoever these folks were talking to knew when their phone mates would arrive, and how to reach their party if they didn't show.

So, there I was, in downtown San Diego, entering a cell phone vendor's storefront as a newcomer. A salesman with a name tag reading “Jesus” offered an inquiring hello. I swallowed what small portions of pride I had left and told him my dilemma;

“I need a phone, and I need a plan”.

A bitter sweet comedy from Philip Schultz

This was originally posted a year ago, I believe, and just today found some additional thoughts on Philip Schultz's fine poem; vanity , perhaps, but not without purpose. Enjoy.--tb
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The last Tuesday poem in Slate caught my eye, made me laugh, and made me sigh (just a little). "Failure" by Philip Schultz is that kind of poem, a potentially maudlin and morose subject matter that draws you in with some unexpected punch lines and left turns. This is as fine a lament for the Walter Mitty type as Tragic Figure as I've ever read. I thought this was a piece of comic writing, a funny monologue that gathers each tense muscle and clustered ganglia in a man's set-upon shoulders and releases the collected negativity as a Woody Allen digression where one defends the unsupportable with unexpected distinctions. It opens up with an opening line worthy of an early Philip Roth novel:

To pay for my father's funeral
I borrowed money from people
he already owed money to.
One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can't remember
a nobody's name, that's why
they're called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.

Poet Philip Schultz has a perfect set up with which to riff with variations of the punch line, and that he does, admitting the farcical nature of a father who's plans for success seemed from the outset unworkable to everyone but him

An uncle, counting on his fingers
my father's business failures—
a parking lot that raised geese,
a motel that raffled honeymoons,
a bowling alley with roving mariachis—
failed to love and honor his brother,
who showed him how to whistle
under covers, steal apples
with his right or left hand.

What makes the poem moving is the particular reserve Schultz shows here ; there is, to be sure, plenty of material in family recollecting where each stain , wrinkle and idiosyncratic whiff of dysfunction upon the family name can be a suitable launching pad for confessions, first person melodramas, compulsively unfunny comedies of baroque proportions, but Schultz keeps his ground. He admits his father's faults, enumerates documented failures, gives details of things that were bothersome, nettlesome, annoying--watches that pinch the wrist, snoring during movies--and yet embraces him all the more. Admitting his father's flaws he admits his own--the fuck ups of the father are visited upon the son? -- and in doing so finds a clue to what comes to the bare fact of existence, a constant seeking to create a context in which can exist on their own terms , not what's dictated by religion and financial institutions:

He didn't believe in:
savings insurance newspapers
vegetables good or evil human
frailty history or God.
Our family avoided us,
fearing boils. I left town
but failed to get away.

If the dead father's strivings had been successful, the same said "cause" of his perceived failures would have been viewed as the source of his good fortune. I don't think this poem has any real religious underpinnings other than the rabbi's closed-system dismissal of a deceased's refusal to invest in dogma. He is, rather, more a model of what we view the truly existential man, someone (to paraphrase Sartre) "condemned to freedom" who defined himself by his resolute decisions and actions, and by his acceptance for what the results, good or bad, turned out to be. This implies is that the son assumes his father preferred to live a life of his own defining, in good faith, instead of swearing alliance to a belief systems he had no use for. The son, who left town but never escaped, realizes that there is more of his father's temperament within himself than he might have first realized.

His father wasn't a nobody, Schultz insists, he was a man of distinction: he was one who tried and failed repeatedly to create meaning his life, and that is something to be understood, not belittled. Unsaid and yet implied, Schultz finds himself channeling his father's unrest and sees for himself a variation on his father's life in his own attempts to accommodate a life that seems like a suit that's 5 sizes too big. He left town but he failed to get away. There religious element is important in the poem because it characterizes what cultural institutions the deceased father placed himself outside of while he was alive, making up his own mind about what he wanted to do with his life. It's my feeling that Schultz intends (and succeeds, I think) in conveying the specific tone of the belated criticism. The poem, though, doesn't involve a critique of a man who turned his back on the faith that might have a line on a One True God; that would make it dogma, not poetry, however skillful the language. What's involved here, in a more general (and more purposeful) sense is the judgment of groups casting judgments on members of their faith, their group, who they feel have strayed, be they agnostic Jews, lapsed Catholics. The situation is universal, if we dare use the word, but the texture is culturally specific.

Frank Rich finds his price, loses his voice

Frank Rich, a cultural and political columnist for the New York Times, has recently announced that he has signed on with HBO as an advisor, of sorts, his task being to aid them in creating new programming. A plum engagement in addition to his NYT chores, and the Times, so recently burned with too many reporter scandals, has slapped Rich with a restriction that he may not write about his work with HBO, or about HBO at all. Avoiding a conflict of interest is prudent, yes, but the situation effectively neuters Rich as a critic, even on those cultural products he has no financial interest in. A nominal critic, I think, ought not be accepting any money for any work from any entertainment combine. Whatever safeguards The Times sets in place to keep Rich's intergrety in tact, it's become clear that the man is willing to accept funds and so have his voice modulated, if not muted outright.

I'm of the mind that Frank Rich must choose one or the other , be a critic not beholden to anyone who can say as they please, or be a cultural entrepreneur , delivering arts-related programming to the marketplace and subject to honest commentary. I've never been comfortable with the idea that Time magazine reviewers, for example, are charged with critiquing the worth the movies , television shows and books published by the subsidiaries of its parent company, Time Warner, even if the magazine editors made it a point of including unfavorable reviews among the estimations.The point is that a corporation like Time Warner , in effect, is controlling the conversation of their product by having both film makers and reviewers on their stuff, a situation that mutes negative remarks and converts merely into the buzz that excites potential viewers to buy tickets.

Lacking an independent voice outside the the Corporate culture that produces the products diminishes the reliability of the reviews as honest appraisals. Worse, though, is that the situation of corporations having studios , publishers and reviewers on the payroll makes the task of speaking a brutal truth to power--our entertainment industries produces crap and little else-- too daunting a task, and produces, in effect, a collective feeling to merely allow the mediocrity continue . Rich, in any case, is about to become a compromised presence on the pundit scene, and that's a shame.