From the Larger Houses
Wedding Day by Dana Levin. Copper Canyon: 2005. 68 pp.
$14.
Reviews by Patty Seyburn.
In Dana Levin's
second collection, Wedding Day, the body and soul put on the
gloves again, tormenting and taunting each other to reach some sort
of provisional agreement. What makes this book worth reading is not,
however, this timeless argument, but what feels like direct exposure
to the viscera of body and soul, with all the instrumentation and
diction available to the modern poet. Beyond "progress" in
scientific terms lies the essential question of whether the body, as
vessel, has any essential meaning without its partner in crime, its
"ember of light," reminiscent of the shattered vessel and scattered
light described in Jewish mystical texts. The traditional wedding
day gets little to no play as a possible union between two people.
The only coming together desired or plausible in this collection is
between the corporeal and the spiritual, and their vow to survive,
their tenuous commitment, for better or worse.
The body in this book is no stranger to pain, nor the temptation of
rescue or respite from it. The narcotic quality of Levin's poems is
not incidental, laced into content as well pacing. In the opening
poem, alone, titled "Techno," there's amphetamine (twice), aspirin,
pharmaceutical and methedrine (both modifying "light"), bicarbonate,
and a powder that's both the stuff inside capsules and the remaining
substance of Lot's wife. Levin's speaker claims "not to look": a
daring beginning for a book of poems, which seem often so fraught
with irreconcilable memory.
The memory of this book is less lobe, however, than collective.
Levin is concerned with the American psyche, and how it is shaped by
violence and culture, and, it would seem, drugs, all yoked by
aesthetics. The medicine chest of curatives accompanies a flurry of
medical terms and body parts: this is the dominant diction of the
book, and it's a pleasure to read a group of poems that provide some
sense of lexical cohesion, some ligature that functions semantically
as well as sonically. Of course, the music of medicine and the body
is unfailingly Latinate, affix and prefix driven, cool to the touch,
but the echoes are there, nonetheless.
It's hard to imagine these poems in any other form than doggedly
free verse, injected with a great deal of air between lines so that
the white space shapes the poems as much as the text. Jorie Graham
may have taught Levin's generation how - and why - to do this, but
they've applied the technique, or necessity, to the short lyric as
well as the long rumination that wanders from subject to image to
impression and never arrives when or where expected. Levin's lyrics
are among the best poems of this collection. The first of three
poems titled "Ars Poetica" is stunning, a brief, veiled lyric that
captures the terror of inspiration and the transformation of life
into art:
Six monarch
butterfly cocoons
clinging to the back of your throat -
you could feel their gold wings trembling.
You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
gagging to spit them out -
and a voice saying, Don't, don't -
The latter two "Ars"
utilize more fragments and italics, and in the second, Levin names
her technique: "so the poets became interested in fragments,
interruptions ... / the little bit of saying lit by the unsaid." She
uses the metapoetical reference, questioning the strategy of
experimental poetry, in the poem that goes unidentified as an "Ars"
but is really the Ars of the collection, called "Quelquechose." It
may be the best poem in the book, weaving the poet's talent for
lyricism with her predilection for fragment and sprawl. If not that,
it's certainly the most optimistic, concluding with allusions to the
possibility of beauty and tenderness amidst the damage done to the
body, the social contract, and the elusive notion of happiness.
Among the central concerns of this book are form and process, versus
result. Rarely does a poem end with some sort of closing click, as
is fitting for arguments that refuse to resolve in service of some
neat symmetry. Dialogues between two parties - teacher/student,
writer/reader, friends - are a central strategy, and often shown by
the use of italics, which tend to provide the elliptical and
compressed commentary of the subconscious. The italics, on occasion,
threaten to distance the reader too much - they often preface more
straightforward material - but work well in poems such as "Painting
Vacation," where they introduce a close third-person perspective
into an I-Thou poem. The narrator of this book is a closet Romantic
with an oxygen tank (she shows up explicitly in the poem titled "Sumer
Is Icumen In"), a persona with not only desire but the desire for
hope, beauty, and as mentioned, happiness: the stuff that sustains
the soul, even when the body refuses to cooperate.
The Incentive of the Maggot by Ron Slate. Mariner Books/Houghton-Mifflin, 2005. $12.
Poets,
like cigarettes, have brands and iconic temperaments that go in and
out of fashion. For awhile, we liked our poets passionate and
consumptive. Who could forgive Wordsworth for living to be 80? Then,
we decided a career-on-the-side was okay: you could be a medic or an
insurance executive, if necessary. Then, back to the academy.
Now we want our poets to, once again, earn a living doing something
completely other than poetry. When it works, it works: the poems are
filled with the world. When it doesn't work, the poems are sheer
information and rhetoric. In Ron Slate's debut volume,
The Incentive of the Maggot
(catchy title, nu?) his experience as a corporate VP for
25 years makes the poems both interesting and odd, as though one has
engaged a weary tour-guide with access to the upper echelons of
politics, business, and society. Correction: a weary tour-guide with
a complex about the end of the world. It makes Slate an unlikely, if
well-informed prophet, with visions that if not entirely
apocalyptic, are certainly fatalistic.
The first three poems in the book are so compelling, however, that
they manage to stave off concerns about the very endings they
adumbrate. In the opening poem, "Writing off Argentina," the poet
offers a way - contingent, but satisfying in its very limitation -
to endure: "...we are forgetting how to be decently unhappy." It may
not be the Ode to Joy, but it provides some solace. In "The Final
Call," which begins, "Is this the end of the world?" the poet
concludes with this tercet: "Ah, another soft landing./ Though this
time a rather large sheet of sky/tangles and trails down after us."
In "Belgium," the poet uses repetitions of lines to reinforce the
rich tedium of the actions taking place, and the banality of
diplomacy which is, of course, all about language. "The western
nations don't understand each other," he writes. Instead of the
poetic trope of synecdoche, the part standing in for the whole,
Slate asks the whole to stand in for the part: we are nations made
up of individuals, and the metaphors cut both ways, making the
larger entity complicit in the indiscretions and poor judgment of
the solitary figure.
The other jewel in the opening section of the book, "The Demise of
Camembert." It's hard to not like a poem which does as its central
conceit the de-evolution of the French cheese-course and concludes
with the lovely lines: "And you and I, paring away the rind,/do you
have I have a patient nose/for the creamy inwardness of things?"
As happens particularly in first books of poems - even those delayed
by an illustrious career, apparently - there's a section of poems
that have the guise of autobiography. Refreshingly, in one of the
book's more apparently personal poems, "Light Fingers," Slate
actually confesses to something, which has not happened for awhile
in a poem: the most recently "confessionals" have been about other
people's bad behavior. The narrator catalogs various small items
he'd "lifted" from local merchants and manages to cogently analyze
why he'd committed the acts of thievery "...making a daring effort
to be part/of the family's sadness" - and how the sadness translates
into a much larger grief: "...what it means / to be human."
So what is the maggot's incentive? If you're likely to seek out an
explanation for this age-old conundrum, take a rest. The title poem,
terrific as it is, reserves its insects until the poem's end, when
they serve to heal the fallen soldier: "their larvae made a soup in
the gashes and rips/dressed the wounds and farmed our flesh." It's
surprising the 5th
time you read it, and it will be the 50th,
as well. Redemption comes in strange packages.
A weakness in the collection is the lack of musicality in the
language. Apparently, there's not much lyricism at the end of the
world. Though each line is well-crafted, they infrequently catch the
ear's attention. Similarly, the few ekphrastic poems don't manage to
transcend or bring new light to the work being discussed. Slate
exercises greater control over his language in the poems broken up
into quatrains, tercets, and couplets: the stanzas serve their
functions as editors, even when not used as containers of discrete
ideas or images.
Slate's work feels more content than music-driven, but that's not
necessarily a criticism: It offers relevance, and not just to the
politics of the moment, since it rarely addresses current or recent
events. Nor does it claim that one war or conflict is like any
other. Rather, they all feed the end-of-the-world machine, via
commerce and discourse and bloodshed (lions, tigers, bears). The
message of "Maggot" is compelling: the reader actually learns
something about the self and the social, for better and worse.
(Mostly for worse.) And knowledge, after all, isn't such a bad
thing. Even if, saith The Doors, this is the end.