In the Valley of Elah: rent this DVD!

We are still talking about how bittersweet and haggard Tommy Lee Jones was in the Coen Brother's remarkable adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel "No Country for Old Men", understandable enough, but most of us have all but forgotten another amazing film he made that same year, "In the Valley of Elah", an Iraq War-themed murder mystery written and directed by Paul Haggis.I'll have to put in my two cents for "In the Valley of Elah" as one of the best films to come out in 2007. I saw it when it opened in a nearly empty theater, and I could only imagine in retrospect that we hadn't collectively arrived at the moment when we wanted to see Jones shine especially well in a role. That moment arrived a couple of months later with the offering from the Coens So far as demonstrating acting chops, it was a banner year for Jones, particularly in demonstrating his skill at underplaying a character, slowing down his pace, giving his lines a nuanced, cautious pace; this is remarkable for an actor whom was bordering on becoming a Pacino-esque self parody of inappropriate over-stylization of a performance.

"In the Valley of Elah" has a enticingly thick layering of lies, conspiracies and misdirections revolving around a major political blunder, the Iraq War, and in classic detective form the former military police inspector Jones portrays has to confront and puncture each and every cover story other characters are handing him as he conducts his unofficial murder investigation. The screenplay and direction of Paul Haggis is remarkable for the lack of self righteous speeches about the inhumanity of it all--there are no Paddy Chayefsky tirades to be heard anywhere. Rather , there is a laconic tone, a dragging weight to the dialogue as resignation to odious greater events seem to depress the very light.

There is one especially choice frame, when we see Jones from the street as he uses the machines at an all night Kinko's; through the window the interior light brightly burn through the dark street for a few feet, and then grows faint and ragged at the end of it's glowing radiance, suggesting both the urban isolation Ed Hopper could get on a canvas and that this character's world, once young and idealistic,is getting dimmer as he gets closer to a truth of a tragic consequence to a gross demonstration of bad faith. It's a generation clash of the subtlest measures and we can see Jones' notions of integrity, patriotism and honor shrink in the cold vapors of a another generation coached more in buck-passing than duty.

Speechless as Trains

Posted here because it's one of my favorite poems.-tb
__________________

In the drift of the words you are speaking,
wrapped in steam
that unfolds in vapors that vanish
in the cold snap of wind
that blows against
brick houses
that remain beautiful
despite neglect and graffiti,
a half-century of weather,
I am stunned,
speechless as trains.


I am drunk in love
with an idea of you
before we ever spoke words, that is,
committed biography
without being asked,
in a blur it seems
one of us was getting out of a car
in front of a marquee that advertised
a dead man's magic,
giving a panhandler a dollar
drawing up a collar on an oversized coat,
eyes locked into
the swirling twines of
train station steam
from an ideal century,
steel towers and smoke stacks are
rising to the nights' swallowed
promise of a glimpse from the roof of the
tallest building ,
feet moving under you,
but the steam dissipates, torn asunder by
wind and thunder,
I've memorized the lines of your hand,
these are lanes where eternity lives nameless
and absent in the Present Tense,



The same stores, the same houses,
the same neighbors coming and going .
pass me by,
cities are made
for finding dark places
as fingers trace the limits of seams,
the way the threads tear
at the stitches.


All this before
I heard you talk in that twang
and before I knew there was
an idea in your head, a buzz
of book learning that meets the world and negotiates
meanings with truths that have no resonance
except repetition and insanity.

I love those first moments
when it was all image,

The city’s posture bending
to compliment a style you forced even
canyons of tall buildings
and banners for gunboats bearing
dead sailors names
to give themselves away in a rapture of your eyes
lighting the streets and every room with grace
that would be uncanny,
for a minute I believe the city was built
on a hill nearest Gods' dispatching cloud.


But you spoke
instead, about the weather and movies,
my rapture was destroyed and shredded,
you became another pretty head full of brilliant thinking.


History is something you can wrestle with and win,
irony is a language you use with the ease of
turning the pages of a big dictionary,
the double click of the mouse,
subtlety is the Church you attend,
you make the streets that vanish
into perspectives to not disappear but
to continue somewhere over other hills,
in the middle of
a continent whose state capitals
you can name and spell on the Main roads.


You cannot transform my city
into the simple pleasure,
the world is just pure process, a
machinery that never stops,
your brain, my words,


Damn you, damn you,
it's gotten so a man cannot hide
even inside the lust he saves
when love won't follow the script
damn you,


Tonight there's only smart talk,
getting in touch
with my feelings,
framing statements
in generalities that leave room for the
world to resists even momentary certainty,


No escape for the wanna-be wicked,
no sleep without perspective,
the relevance of a sock drawer, pairs of socks,
speechless as trains in the yard
before the daily invention of light,
the day that comes again without knowing you

Brief and banal

Obviousness is not an attractive feature in a poem; you come to the poet wanting something more from words than headlines, cliches, the hackneyed like, and get instead a groady fish tossed in your face. Rachel Hadas, someone whom I've liked reading before, gives me a cold dish. It tastes awful.

Conveniently, a troubled sleep produces a fevered dream of an ominous wedding where , after the anonymous couple finishes their vows and concludes the rite with the ceremonial kiss, the world melodramatically becomes unhinged and unruly. Powerful forces encroach on the transparently joyous occasions and will commence, we assume, to undermine every expectation for the couple's future happiness . But it's not just the wedding pair who are to tormented and subjected to the uncertain whims of a usually cruel fate--the whole neighborhood is infected with the seeping bad faith. The situation goes global.

The air trembled
as if, hooves thundering, a nightmare galloped
past the house along the empty road.
Summer was waning. I was getting old.
The vision of the wedding fell away
and launched me, weary, into a red morning.

Even for a dream sequence this seems rather to rapid a transition between a celebration and gloomy consequences, giving the poem more storyboard, as in film making, than storytelling, odd and menacing as that diffuse narrative was required t me. Rather than an having entree to someone's symbolic equivilents of dread, we have some one pushing figures around a doll house, narrating from afar. It's a forced, ginned up performance.The world was warring, drowning, catching fire.
What we have , in essence , is one of many warnings we've received in our reading lifetimes against putting our faith in traditions, habits , rituals, prayers or anything else one might have hopes for protection against catastrophe or worse. Our expectations of sanctuary, whether in actual , material fact or in spiritual assurance, will slam hard against the brute force of the inevitable forces that gather and express themselves in innumerable ways, from our species territorialism to what forms of seeming revenge Nature herself will heap on us. The couple that's been joined have left childhood and entered into the sphere of adulthood where only truth , hard, unforgiving, unstoppable, holds the reins. People , places and things will vanish, disappear, war clouds will gather, mountains will fall, the god of one's parents will be silent.

Spare as this poem is, it tries too much, a grand slam indictment against false gods and the lot of it; it's dime store Schopenhauer and a c minus paper from a junior college philosophy course. The pessimism that lurks in these stanzas strike my ear as rather too easily achieved, like a tired idea left lying around like some odd object one would grab and use to hammer home a point; it reads like a makeshift construction.It's a bit much, even if this is framed as dream narrative; the anonymity of the wedding couple, the facelessness of anyone who might have lurking in the corners of this congested smacks of a Twilight Zone episode , fine for a show that's been off the air for decades, but a lazy scenario for a poet who wants to do something more than mimic the stylistics of an old TV show.

Emphatic Mumbling:John Ashbery's Glorious Diffusion

I've thought for years that the best way to read John Ashbery's poetry is to first throw the instruction manual away and then go for a fishing trip in his various lakes of opaque meanings. Literally, imagine yourself in a boat in the center of a large body of water and cast a line into the water, and then reel in what pulls and makes the line go taut. Whatever comes up is always a surprise, unexpected, perhaps a tangle of things that wouldn't be bound together or linked in any conceivable but in the dreamy but sleepless realm of Ashbery's actively processing mind and attendant imagination.

This might be the closet an American writer has ever come to transcribing the language of their thought process; for all the conventional wisdom about Ashbery's associations with painters, French surrealists and the rush of popular culture, he very closely resembles the method of Virginia Woolf and the still engaging , if topically staid process of stream-of-conscious.

Ashbery's poems are filled with much of the material world, both natural and that which is manufactured, fashioned, contrived and constructed by human agency. In both Woolf and Ashbery, the central voice, the observer,distanced or not, renders an image, makes it solid and substances, gives it attributes and distinguishing nuance, allows the thing to be played with as the mind associates, puns, constructs parallel universes and contradictory time lines; sections of books, a cold cup of coffee on magazine, a painting under a cloth, shorelines seen from Italian villas, comic book heroes and the breathing of a grudgingly referred to "you" who is voiceless, without input.

I was aware that Ashbery was an adherent of Wallace Stevens and his notion of the Supreme Fiction, a reconfiguration of the tension between Idea and it's physical expression to the senses. But where Stevens constructed a grand rhetoric to address the generic formulations of the everyday--his poems often times sound like critiques of a reality that is inferior to a divine Idea that makes their formation possible--Ashbery makes more informal, casual, and brings the distanced bewilderment to street level. There are glimmers, glimpses, observations and sightings of the physical detail that assures you that you and Ashbery are living on the same planet, and yet at precisely the moment you come to a reassurance, these details blur and merge with the spill over of many other chats and conversations the poet seems to be having. The poems are not monologues, and one cannot call them a "medley of voices", as Richard Poirier had referred to Norman Mailer's Why Are We In Viet Nam?. "Medley" implies an orchestration of unlike parts made to harmonize, to make sense in ways that give pleasure. Ashbery's voice is singular, his own, and what comes from his typewriter are whatever arguments, debates, interrogations are rumbling through his consciousness at that given moment. While Ashbery is capable of the well turned sentence and even sweet music on occasion, his aim isn't to give pleasure, but rather to make the ordinary and nettlesome extraordinarily weird.It's not that his poems are any more accessible than Stevens--his less daunting syntax actually seem to make his poetry more demanding than Stevens'-- but with patience we can comprehend a language we might actually use , a voice that could plausibly be one we would have in those moments of lost thought, daydreaming, vague yet intense yearning when there is so much we want to bring together for a moment of clarity but are frustrated to find that our senses keep changing along with the world they behold.

Ashbery is the central poet for many critics whose projects intend to layout the raise of urban Modernism in American verse. Marjorie Perloff is someone else worth mentioning as much of who she deals with are city poets, worldly, college educated, unashamedly bookish, and unafraid to employ a more vulgar popular culture, IE comic books, movies, advertising, along with the more swank and sophisticated allusions to high culture, whether literature, opera, theatre, painting.

A connecting thread through much of the poets emerging after WW2 was their ambivalence to the plenitude of culture and media--Dwight McDonald's derided mass culture--and began, in their individual endeavors, to fashion particular styles to sift through the cultural dumping ground each of them were witnessing.

Elizabeth Bishop is exquisitely hermetic in her verse, and is much closer to the qualities Stevens praised for poetic surfaces calling their own form into question, and James Merrill , who was something of a virtuoso in sustained, whispering elusiveness.
One sees why some of the poets of the New York School receive more attention from readers and critics, especially the work of Ashbery and Frank O'Hara (and to a lesser degree, the wonderfully digressive poems of Ron Padgett); meanings and intents about the growling contradictory messages of physical reality are dealt with as unresolvable conditions of existence in the work, but the point is how the poet is engaged with their world. It might be said that Ashbery's work makes no sense, and conveys a sense of witness to an ever blooming enlargement of perception.The poetry of the New York School was , in essence, about talking about the world as it unfolded , an attempt to give a cadence and rhythm to the kind of personality which bears witness to the confluence of sight, sound and smells .This is a fitting rite for a city that is in your face, traffic lights, pedestrian density and raw-lettered advertising, the moment you step out the door of your apartment building; everything is seemingly noticed, nothing is trivial, everything is a part of the story. Sheer meaning, hard and fast, is not be found here, but feeling, resonance, introspection are, and it is this several layered ambiguity that keeps a reader up at night, staring out of the window, testing the keyboard as ideas about what we haven't thought about comes in phrases even God himself couldn't explain.O'Hara is not so oblique or confusing--he is popular precisely because he has the lyric capacity to merge his far flung loves of high and low culture and still carry on a rant that achieves a jazzy spontaneity--he is the poet from whom Billy Collins has taken from and tamed for polite company.

Ashbery is the stroller, the walker in the city, the flaneur, the sidewalk engineer examining the city in it's constant self-construction, composing a poetry of association that accompanies a terrain of things with inexplicable uses.

What seems like a mighty muddle in his writing becomes full engagement of a personality in love with what the senses bring him; at his best the intelligence of the poems is transcendent and there is , in the main, a tangible joy in how he phrases his reactions, responses and retorts to a world that always seems to baffle him in some wondrous way.

Peter Manso: notes of a displeased groupie

The 1980s saw the publication of a highly readable oral history of his hero and mentor Norman Mailer, titled "Mailer: His Life and Times", by author Peter Manso. Manso, a good writer in all other respects, has republished the book with a 44-page afterword in which he repays the insult Mailer had paid him when it turned out the biography displeased him greatly. Mailer and Manso were close friends during the eighties, with Manso admitting as much that he was, more or less, Mailer's acolyte.

The pair even shared a beachfront house in Provincetown, MA. Mailer had written to the local newspaper, stating that P.D. Manso is seeking gold in the arid desert of his inner life, where lies and distortions are the sole source of sustenance for him." Ouch. But what puzzles me is that Peter Manso has seemingly nurtured the hurt for over thirty years and now takes a few too many pages to give his account, share gossip, insult Mailer friends. The aggrieved author seems less a wounded innocent than a gold digger irritated that this vein will yield no more.

The lesson, I suppose, is that one ought not live with their heroes. I'd agree that Manso's Mailer biography is a fascinating read as far as it goes; it's hard to go astray when you've got a group of interesting people giving an intimate account of a singularly intriguing and often brilliant personality like Mailer. But based on this, Manso's introduction to the new edition just sounds like 44 pages of sour grape he wants everyone to take a sip from. The issue with having heroes who embody every virtue and goal one desires for themselves is that they will betray you, whether they're doing it out of love or not.

I've no idea what went on between the two men while they occupied that beachfront property, but it's very possible Mailer had other things he wanted to do besides listening to the sound and sight of a dedicated fanboy sucking up; perhaps Manso crossed over from being a mere acolyte and exhibited a malignant sycophancy. Or maybe not; Manso would have served himself better getting over a three-decade-old slight and finessed his remarks a tad more. It was Mailer's particular genius to make himself, as subject, fascinating in ways a reader wouldn't have suspected. That same talent isn't Manso's. Would that he merely republished his worthy oral history and gone onto another book.

Paul Dresman

Full disclosure: Paul Dresman was a teacher of mine at the University of California, San Diego, and he was the nearest thing I had to a poetry mentor. He has a genius for the unexpected phrase to describe what would go unnoticed in situations and encounters, and he has one of the most perfectly developed ears I've come across; his free verse has a vital, rhythm,a sound of surprise. Here, he provides us with a comic scenario for the tensions between the animal and human kingdoms; what is revealed is that we are getting in the way, quite unaware that we share the planet and soon enough will experience a similar dilemma. -tb_____________

Speaking of Routes

By Paul Dresman


Behind the beaches, the plains
cut back into the red ochre,
yellow ochre canyons
and, in places, the torrey pines
have been slashed to the quick
to lift houses on pads,
rainbirds turning circles,
grasses ad ornamentals
where dry brush rattled pods
and the elfin forest went about
surviving each dry year
(rabbits love to come at dawn
and graze the fresh watered lawns).


Where the freeway cuts and concretes the access
the animals are funneled through the underpass
Nights in your lights (maybe one-eyed, returning from parties)
their eyes flash and they move hugely
--foxes coming into sudden new view


But they pass as fast as a pair of hips
in a party kitchen
moves around behind you, brushing you. lightly
inscribing a small intaglio in your imago,
a moment between car and animal,
between hello and where are we going to go?

But the onramp beckons, the empty lanes
lead to the cities of the plains
where animals are found in dreams
like a passing fancy of endless party people
dancing in circles, wanting…


The animals are wanting. One half
of our face caves away. We stand,
along the chain link, waiting
to cross the impassable highway.