An unfair take on Derek Walcott

I am not a fan of Derek Walcott, and here I get the usual DW routine of reading a poet who spends an inordinate amount of time trying to make what he sees, smells,hears, tastes interesting in themselves, blessed only with an excess of qualifiers that the poem becomes something like perfectly fine cup of coffee ruined with too many spoons of sugar. It's not that I haven't tried to get acquainted with the man's work; he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature, after all, and was at the time required reading for anyone thinking themselves up on poetry. The Nobel Committee isn't infallible, though, and matched Walcott prolix poetasting in 1992 with the selection of Dario Fo in 1997, a questionably lefty playwright I think never should have been allowed the small press. 

The difference, of course, is that Walcott has an audience, the same audience that sees poetry as a means to get to the Idea behind the Things we see , taste, and feel, the same audience Billy Collins more skillfully (and succinctly) caters to. And so Walcott hams up the language with digressions that offer more silt than sunshine. It might be a dual problem between reader and poet--his audience thinks he's going somewhere with the elephantine mythology he constructs, and so does the poet.

The problem, I guess, is that Walcott tries for elegance and transcendence and yet never convinces you that he's even looked out the window let alone taken a trip anywhere. There is so much rocking back and forth between obvious extremes of situation, so many adjectives and verbs seeking to convince you that details being offered are more exciting and significant because DW perceived and categorized them. It is both arch and prosaic, a monotony of routine list making.

THE SEASON OF PHANTASMAL PEACE 

by Derek Walcott,

born in St. Lucia in 1930

Then all the nations of birds lifted together

the huge net of the shadows of this earth

in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,

stitching and crossing it. They lifted up

the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,

the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,

the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill -- 

the net rising soundless at night, the birds' cries soundless, until

there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,

only this passage of phantasmal light

that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,

what the ospreys trailed behind them in the silvery ropes

that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear

battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,

bearing the net higher, covering this world

like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing 

the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes

of a child fluttering to sleep;

it was the light

that you will see at evening on the side of a hill

in yellow October, and no one hearing knew

what change had brought into the raven's cawing,

the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough

such an immense, soundless, and high concern

for the fields and cities where the birds belong,

except it was their seasonal passing, Love,

made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,

something brighter than pity for the wingless ones

below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,

and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices

above all change, betrayals of falling suns, 

and this season lasted one moment, like the pause

between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,

but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

This is the kind of self-consciously literary language that ruins the literary experience for millions of readers who otherwise wish to be transported through a brilliant use of language. The theater advice applies here, "don't let them see you act", meaning that the effort to evoke conditions and states of experience through artistic means should seem effortless; the technique should be invisible , unnoticed. The artful should conveyed without the conspicuous essence of art. Walcott's poems make think of a man who wants to let you know that he's a poet, that he is a wordsmith.The elegance for the sake of elegance always seems more the subject in Walcott's poems, or the point of the writing; the subject exists primarily as a means to display  his  virtuosity. The net effect, in my readings of him on an off for twenty years or so, is a stalling tactic--the undecidability isn't an Ashbery like conundrum after one of his intense and relatively compact scrutinies between his Stevens-like formations of perfect Ideal Types and the world independent of the senses. In Ashbery's and Stevens' cases, the point of the poems was to evocatively ponder the distance between perception and a material existence that will not conform to the demands of brilliant language. That creates tension,suspense, irony; there is intrigue and there is reader interest in what the poet makes of it, if anything.

Success, though, depends on how      well the language used to accommodate the subject and ideas being subjected to the kinds of extra-critical interrogation. For Walcott, it too often seems a case of indecision of what to settle on as a nest of notions on which to write and instead obscuring that blankness with sparkling qualifiers that , after a point, enhance not ideas or emotions but rather emptiness, a lack of anything interesting to say.  It's not for me to demand what this means because that's the least interesting thing to worry about in a discussion of a work, but I would expect a competent poem to at least be able to evoke sensations, associations and the like toward a satisfying ambiguity; a certain genius with the language is required, and Walcott, Nobel Prize or no, hasn't that genius. The banal poeticisms of "soundless voices", "betrayals of falling suns" "the pause between dusk and darkness" and the like are arty rather than artful, It amazes a certain readership,but to me this borders on kitsch.

"When in the Uterine Empyrean They Told Me" by Patrick Donnelly

"When in the Uterine Empyrean They Told Me" by Patrick Donnelly is one of the more intriguing poems I've come across in the last couple of years, a recollection of someone trying to bring coherence of things he has heard in the ether, whether words themselves or the sensations that suggest them. There is that feeling that the narrating consciousness is off stage, trying to remember his lines and the marks they're supposed to hit, trying all this time to integrate the warnings, advice and sensory overload that accumulate as the cue for the narrator's entrance onto the life's stage draws near.

Somewhere in his writings(in his story/essay "Eureka", I believe) Poe writes of the "memory from before birth" , a metaphysical riff he practiced as he waxed grandiloquent about Aristocracy and their fated superiority in the material world; his idea, if memory serves ,is that there are those among us who are born with a knowledge of who we are and what we are to do in the ordering of the dimensions balancing the physical and ethereal plains. For Poe, of course, this was an attempt to buttress his obsession with decadence and degeneration with a philosophical waxing, and it gives the whole notion that souls about to be born have a whole and lucid set of instructions with them as to their purpose,their manner, their temperament and the talents that will emerge as a result. It's a flaky design of the unseen path to this life, but it does make poetic sense considering Poe's conviction that only that which is in the last moments of life, the precise moment before skin goes brittle and breaks, can be truly beautiful. His theory and his tales and poems are a package deal.

Donnelly's poem, though, is decidedly non-determinist in its vision of the pre-life, a terrain not misted but corporeal, fluid, a drift of nutrients and sensations that carry medley of voices that seem to a streaming audio of generation-ally expressed family personality.

When in the uterine empyrean they told me

of love, they named it a sickness, fever, impediment
to enlightenment. Some swore it could make you wail
over hills of hell in a long black veil, defenestrate

yourself in a Second Empire gown, or stand
wringing-wet at the intersection with a cup and a sign
reading COMFORT ME WITH APPLES.

"They", to be sure, are not named, they are faceless, they are without form but are vivid in the nature of the kinds of love this family has expressed, experienced, had lost. These are phrases and clipped whispers that might be trying to give warning of what lures will chain you to drudgery and hardship or a promise of what joys and pleasures await that will make the crushing physicality of life worth the struggle. The signals are crossed, confused, and there is pleasure in the reading of these lines; this is a consciousness that is attempting to come up with a finite picture of what's to come based on bits and pieces that drift boy on the blood flow. But there is clamour, more noise, and what seems to get louder are less warnings about what one will materially wedded to once they emerge into the hard light, but rather grand and anonymous forces will seek to rule one's existence, enforcing a quizzical Will with vague threats;

There were a few, humiliated and exalted, who rose
like comets in yellowy tiers, to sing in Provençal
of the Name, the Name, the same longing Name.

But others warned that whom He loves, He corrects,
of "friendship with benefits," balcony scenes, mad scenes
in all-white restaurants, of the turned back in bed.
It's an argument that's overheard, a bickering the yet undelivered is being drawn into even before one gets the chance to master their language or gather experience from which to assert them self as fresh, independent, unsullied. This is the bickering and division that is Original Sin, and one is brought into the world suddenly, painfully, protesting and ready for battle.So our soul is already propagandized, seduced, ready for the battle; Donnelly suggest that there is the moment when a choice is given, that one might miscarry them self and defer their emergence or dive, so to speak, right into the rumble and bustle of the messy world that awaits. Our narrator is primed for action, and responds to a genetic inevitability:

But when they said I could remain behind
if I chose, like an unlit lamp,
sounding my brass and tinkling my cymbal,

I didn't think, I seized
the bloody flag of my attachments
and tore down the tunnel of what I couldn't know

was my millionth birth.

Donnelly sets up an interesting parallel to Poe's essay, and gives us a rich imagining of how our deeds rationalizations and best motivations might come to influence generations to come. There is something reminiscent of D.H.Lawrence in this poem in that the novelist had a theory that the best virtues and worst traits of men and women are exchanged through love making, and that the qualities or infirmities are passed on "in the blood". It had been suggested that the poem was Donnelly's attempt to write about the tension between being gay and trying to abide by a spiritual doctrine that considers your very being an abomination, but I demur.It's there if you're determined to find it, but it seems a stretch. What I picked up on was the embattled spirit coming through some convulsively argumentative and contradictory loop from which it attempts to make sense of, coming into life already fated to be self-seeking and self-defeating.

This , for me, suggests an absent God whose plans have gotten static and stripped of anything like grace or transcendence, and the generationally collected consequence of ill will and meanness congests the air, as it were, of the elevated plain. It's an existentialist situation mixed in with a notion of eternal recurrence, reincarnation; Mailer does something similar with his novel Ancient Evenings in which a magic-dabbling Phaero manages to extend his lineage through the ages, but grows increasingly distraught that his version of immortality morphs in meaning and uses beyond his grandiose scheme.

Homosexuality might well be one thing Donnelly intended for his stew of tensions and bad faith results, but I don't the poem is about the problematic nature of being gay and attempting an authentic ,loving life; the narrator's dilemma, I think, is more open ended than that, and this is where the power of the poem lies for me, in the way the language can be so vivid, concrete, and yet remain oblique.

The notions are repellent, sure, and there are grounds aplenty to attack them, but the case here is that Donnelly has taken the over riding idea and made it much less abstract, given us a scenario in an actual voice, and provokes from us a sympathy for the new born who must emerge from the chaos and struggle against the bitterness that has already been foisted upon him, This is a fascinating poem.

USED BOOKS: the reputation of writers

There's brilliance in Norman Mailer's readings of how mass culture turns us into somnambulant consumers, but it would have been better, saner perhaps if he'd said that whites should walk a mile in a suffering man's shows rather than reify his (and her) culture and then wax philosophical about their supposed relationship to violence. On many points one can argue was on the mark , but his supposition that a keen and honest sort of violence , person to person (as opposed to intuitional violence perpetrated by the state) enables an individual to have a more authentic life sounds a sophomore crush than it does a useful cure. Mailer, though, backed away from these statements in terms of how violence was treated in his work. The best examples are two novels, written one after the other, An American Dream and Why are We in Vietnam? Dream rather obviously was a metaphorical attempt to duplicate the delirium and raging insanity of stabbing his own wife Adele with a character who shores up his manhood with the murder of his wife, beating up a black character obviously modeled after Miles Davis, stealing a Mob boss's girl friend, and defying the New York City police department (and other federal agencies) in making the murder look like a suicide. It is an exciting and disturbing book, written in sheer deadline mania, with it in mind to present place the reader inside the mind of someone who is seduced by the lure of violence. Mailer, I think, was disturbed by the turns his imagination took, and gave us next a metaphorical study of how such monstrosity comes into being, Why are We in Vietnam? being essentially a blow-torched recasting of Faulkner's story The Bear, told in the voice of a narrator who mashes languages, tongues, and tones and varying degrees of dictions and slang to describe a bloody bear hunt in Alaska.

Vietnam, one must note, isn't mentioned until the last page, and one can discern the answer that makes for the novel's title; we were in Vietnam because, as a country with an insane faith in rugged individualism and the right to bear arms, we were compelled to be in that country as an armed, occupying. We were there because we had to be, it was in our blood. Mailer's conclusion echoes William Carlos Williams ' quote that "...the pure products of America go insane..." Mailer never repudiated The White Negro, but he did treat violence as a negative result of being It's one of those books I always see lying around somewhere, and it's one that I always pass by.. Giles Goat Boy I've never read It's one of those books I always see lying around somewhere, and it's one that I always pass by. No particular reason. But I did enjoy his The Floating Opera and The End of the Road, and I found his essays on literature to some of the most trenchant commentary offered by a contemporary American author. The Floating Opera, I’d say, was when the post-modern novel, ever self-reflective of its own narrative technique and the embedded hegemonies they contain, was written back when such stance still had the capacity to be comic, satiric, and ironic without that last quality being the default tone for an entire story’s length. This was quite a bit before the term was invented and then became codified as a style one may learn and mimic for a designated middle brow audience; Barth, Pynchon, Barthelme, DeLillo, Vonnegut, these writers had the spirit of Twain more than one would suspect; as Twain investigated the effects of the East Coast capitalist culture changing the face of American cultures in the Western States with the reach of railroad lines to spread it’s values and economic philosophy, our nascent post moderns traced the places when the grand narratives that made our sense of place and purpose began to slip, as technology shrank the world , broadened awareness of Others , and unleashed counter narratives to the end all and be all of the world.

Robert Coover is one of the most interesting writers from that generation of meta-fictionists--he is what I think of when I think of a writer taking apart a narrative strategy and making the parts fit in new and maddening ways. Spanking the Maid was deliciously skewed where Robert Coover retells, reshapes, reformulates a hackneyed seduction scenario which adheres, in all the twisting and colorations, to the classic line of erotic writing; the excitement isn't in the getting , but in the anticipation of getting, in the suspense between subjects. Robert Coover makes the suspension that space where the senses are no aid to one's idea of self-empowerment. The Universal Baseball Association is a book I consider to be as close to a Great American Novel as anything of worth that's been published in the last fifty years. That I've read anyway. Origin of the Brunists is especially potent, and I think his writing on end-of-the-world cults is as potent as DeLillo's or Pynchon's, maybe even more so.

What I find interesting is that the writing of these writers--Barth, Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon, Ronald Sukinec-- follow up on the proto meta-fiction Lawrence Sterne gave the world with the adventures of Tristam Shanty and the rather obvious and beguiling conceit that the characters are aware they are contained in book. So you're right, there's nothing new, as it were, in this kind of writing, but it does one well to see that the form can thrive with writers who can master their materials and the form and invent something that produces both pleasure and intellection.

On that score, the ability to make one laugh as they read and gain an insoluble insight in a fictional form, Gore Vidal will have his reputation rise, as you mentioned, since he is a more disciplined novelist than Mailer --Duluth is undervalued indeed-- and his essays, while sometimes recycling various testimonials , are models of how a writer ought to think at the keyboard; clearly, unaffected by conventional wisdom, willing to advance an unpopular but soundly argued alternative to received opinion in clear, elegantly phrased language.

USED BOOKS: All the King's Men

All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren (Harvest Books)

I recently re-read Robert Penn Warren's "All The King's Men" after seeing the needless 2006 film remake starring Sean Penn, curious to see how well the tale had worn now that we're in the serious business of considering which way the country will go. I enjoyed nearly as much as when I first came across it during a course while in college. I had read Robert Penn Warren as a poet and critic of the Fugitive Group, and I was never convinced even as an impressionable, nee gullible romantic by his attempts to persuade his readers that what we need is a return to an agrarian economy, and all the values and virtues that come with it. This was a return-to-Eden move that will spring up occasionally in the history of literary thought which seemed less an inspiration to improve life or make lives more authentic through action than it was to dodge the issue about the hard labor of living according to principles based on measurable action; it’s easier to talk the revolution into being than to hand out a leaflet. As such, I'm too much of a city kid, and even as a whelp thought that Warren's idealization of an old southern moral superiority to be soft at the center, not what I think poetry in the 20th century needs to be. Life in the city, even the idealized down towns of my imagination, was better than pouching the back forty, feeding the chickens, let alone waking up before sunrise to participate in a life that was loathsome to dwell on. Warren’s poems to those virtues were lost on me; there was static where he intended music to be heard. He was a better novelist, and "the entire King's Men" is indeed a masterpiece on several counts, but the center attraction is Willie Stark, Warren’s fictional depiction of Huey Long. Big, blustering, swaggering, a loud and dynamic presence of sheer Will-Too-Power who speaks of serving the people in direct and personal ways and swears to fight big ticket cheaters and scoundrels on their behalf , but who is seduced not by the passion for justice than by the accumulation of power for its own sake. The novel becomes a tragedy, a loud, tawdry, intensely observed tragedy as Stark declines and dies pathetically and nothing and no one in his wake is changed for the better. Matters by novel’s end seem as though they will only get worse for sometime to come, which is part of the price humans pay for giving over their own social obligations to work as a community to a charismatic figure who, despite protests to the contrary, has stolen their birthright to self-governance and has himself mistaken himself as the source of all moral authority. Hubris at it’s funkiest.

USED BOOKS: Tough Guys Don't Dance

Tough Guys Don't Dance
Norman Mailer (Random House)

Mailer had said that he wanted to write something fast, nasty and fun after the time and energy he lavished on two of brilliant and more ambitious projects, Ancient Evenings and Executioner's Song. Tough Guys Don't Dance is that book, in the tradition of Chandler, Hammett, Ross MacDonald.

Tim Madden wakes up after a long life of wasting away as a binging alcoholic and finds his bed drenched in blood; later he finds his wife's severed head in a secret pot stash. He, however remembers none of it, and this provides Mailer ample room to ruminate about the metaphysics of hangovers and black outs and the perversions one finds themselves willing to commit when wealth and power are at stake. The cast of characters are unruly, pinched in the nerve and casting a faint whiff of what one imagines the store room where Dorian Gray's portrait was held in sick secrecy. Madden, hardly an innocent , stumbles and routs about trying to piece together the events of his last binge, terrified in the possibility that he might well be his wife's killer.

This is the most horrible of personal journeys, the saga of a man seeking evidence as to whether he's a monster or merely a hapless dupe.Mailer's prose is breathtaking and poetic, and creates a tension with the gamy undertakings of the plot. This is not one of Mailer's masterworks, not be a long shot, but it has verve and drive and a splendidly sick wit, and it reminds us that Mailer can construct an odd tale and twist it in any direction he pleases. Among the considerable graces of one of Mailer's most controversial novels An American Dream were the flights of poetry and jazz-tempo'd cadences the late writer could draw from the paranoia and psychic dissolution of an alcoholic finding himself crushed by a world he could not will into his designs, and Tough Guys has much of that desperate, tragic elan coursing through it's noir-toned narrative. Think what you may of Mailer the masculinist, Mailer the artist was an acute witness to an embattled soul accommodating powers greater than itself.

"Confinement", take 2

I'd say that the "treadmill" I refer is evidence of the confinement Hoagland is writing about; what's for certain is that at this moment, the experience recollected in the poem, he wants out of the life he no longer has empathy for. I don't think the poem is political in the way some have suggested, although it starts that way. Rather, the first stanza is set up as a situation that will be contrasted against the narrator's increasing unease, and with the final stanza, he alone in the room with a television blaring with the sound off, we find him relating not to the righteousness of the cause, but only to the gathered anger and rage itself. All these angry faces seemed ready to burst out of their confines, spill over, render their former social relationships meaningless. What appeals to me is not the sense this makes as an argument rather than the sense it gives of the sensation of being closed in and set upon, and the increasing level of the instinct of fight-or-flight.

The poem had been criticized for making use of political reference in order to make a self-centered confession, but saying that Hoagland's use of a politics situation is narcissistic is a little shallow. Hoagland's narrator is responding to the jacked-up reporting and manipulated images of the situation, an editing style designed to ratchet up the viewer's anxiety level; Marcuse discusses this when he refers to the Thanatonic desire, which is the desire to consume, engineered by marketing, to deny an impending sense of doom. The poet here is on the money and accomplishes the task of getting at a common malaise that is an obvious under current in a materialist culture.

The poem, though, is primarily about the narrator's own plight.It's an efficient dialectic the poet puts across here.Remember that his unraveling is triggered, by implication, by a media hyped reports of a coup in the Middle East, cause of the turmoil not disclosed. It sets the tone for the rest of his day, which he was obviously anticipating with dread. After he is saturated with the alienating currents of the memorial service, he returns from the local to the global, witnessing angry televised protests, feeling it as rage about to spill over or explode from the box containing it, and recognizes at once that he isn't the only one who feels like this. He indeed does relate to something larger than his own unease; he realizes the discomfort is shared, the rage is same whatever the language.
Lastly, the last stanza about the pall bearers is choice. Sometimes attending funerals seem like reruns of old tv shows, as the causes of death and the tributes and regrets expressed in grief seem interchangeable after awhile. You get the feeling that you're watching a teaser trailer of an upcoming feature, your own demise. Hoagland's wit is appreciated here.

"CONFINEMENT" by Tony Hoagland: the desire to smash the box

The misery of the individual in crowds is the theme here, and death itself is the only release available to the harried sole who wants an end their unceasing trudge on what has become a grueling, repetitious treadmill.Tony Hoagland is a writer I like because of his skill at constructing what begins as conventional narrative--in this case one suspects he is about to go into a jejune broadside about power corrupting absolutely--and then changing course ever so, to go with a counter narrative from his own life. "Confinement" goes from the global to the local with a swiftness of association that's substantiated by Hoagland's attention to small but telling details, and his particular skill at drawing distinctions and then erasing them. There is what we take to be the description of televised news headlines of a coup

The dictator in the turban died and was replaced
by a dictator in a Western business suit.
Now that he looked like all the other leaders, observers

detected a certain relaxing of tensions. Something in the air
said the weather was changing,
and if you looked up at the sky and squinted, you could almost see

the faint dollar signs embossed upon the big, migrating clouds

,

And then the abrupt transition to the narrator's real time doings, snapped from a gaze of silent news headlines to his actual task of trying to get to a funeral on the other side of town. There is something of what-the-hell happening here , with the conventionally phrased anti-politician rhetoric of the first sequence and the WHAM! segue that comes without warning, but there is something; it's about the details, the creeping , scarcely contained dread that creeps through the body as one observes themselves in a crowd gathered to the departed, a brother in law who had large appetites and bad habits that caused his demise and forced this ritualized grieving on his family and associates. The anxiety of trying to think of nice things to say about someone you scarcely knew to people you're not especially interested in is credibly conveyed here;

And Barney was dead, big PartyBoy Barney,
famous for his appetite and lack of self-control—
—now, needing an extra-large coffin,

as if he was taking his old friends
Drinking Eating and Smoking
into the hole with him.

—So what hovered over the proceedings that afternoon
was a mixture of grief and vindication—
like a complex sauce the pallbearers and aunts

were floating in, each one thinking,
"Oh God! I told him this would happen!"

I like the way Hoagland alternates between his terse narration and the overheard remarks of the other mourners, the babbling, weeping, beseeching voices that are confounded with the death of someone in their concentric spheres of association. Escape is the theme here, a need for release from what imprisons the body , whether socially, addictively, physically, and Hoagland's observes , toward the end, he finds an empty room with a television turned on, sound off, recalling the coup presented in precis in the first stanza. A hit , a palpable hit, an undeniable aha, eureka, a small but actual moment of clarity reveals itself, in a flash of insight;

Even with the sound off,
not even knowing the name of the country,
I thought that I could understand

what they were protesting about,
what had made them so angry:

They wanted to be let out of the TV set;

This is the closest most of us will come to a zen moment where we find ourselves witnessing the thing itself and not the confines or shadows of our perceptual filters as they mold our experience into something useful for a consumer economy; this is about getting caught up in more demands on our energy than our mind or our soul can stand, those requests , entreaties, commands from outside ourselves that continue to resound even as we feel our autonomy being crowded out of consideration.It doesn't matter what killed his brother in law, it doesn't matter what style of suit a dictator wears, it matters little what mourners think they should have done or what the departed might have thought after the eulogies are read, there comes the time when one all the events and material things in the world cease to have delineated meanings and rational purposes and come to instead symbolize the crushing burden one feels in the extremity of radical self-consciousness. The reason for the televised protests wasn't what our beleaguered soul related to, it was the energy that needed release, violent release. He wants out of the box as well. Escape is the issue, and it doesn't matter to.