On Asberry Burt says his poems are intellectual challenges, looking ever new to puncture the illusion of speech. Asberry is intimately evasive, plays at serious paradox, in truism and at a ‘very plain level’ teases the reader, giving us speech we never hear even though we wish we did and a supercompressed history, addressing what feeling, what basis of fact writing requires. Critic Bonnie Costello says; ‘ writing and reading require the very silence and solitude they are designed to dispel’ which locks us into ‘a repeated experience of embarrassment.’ Before this poem Ashbery was 1950s and 1960s, haunting a strange margin, part of New York school with Barbara Guest and Frank O’Hara, then in the 70s a weird central force among white Anglo poets, Harold Bloom’s Romantic prophet like Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane – and a language poet of slipperiness. Susan Schultz lists him: ‘ There is a meditative Ashbery, a formalist Ashbery, a comic Ashbery, a late-Romantic Asbery. A Language poet Ashbery…'(“The Tribe of John.”) It’s an ars poetica, telling us what poetry is. ‘His poems can seem like ingenious machines for making nearly any statement look faintly ridiculous, especially any statement about the principles of the poetic machine’s construction’ says Michael Clune. So you can see what my process is here: I’m claiming that whatever is being said about these poets is being said, one time or another, about Dylan. So he’s real enough, good enough and these commentaries are really about him too.
Tato Laviera’s ‘tito madera smith’ comes out of a Puerto Rican semi-secret Africa America island, Puerto Rican and New York overlap and fusion. Nuyorican is a praise poem reaching back to Pindar to defend a culture against white Anglo detractors and Puerto Rican nationalists of the 70s who wanted to separate and refuse fusion. Laviera writes: ‘I have five hats, all Puerto Rican, the Latino hat, the urban hat, the black hat, the Boricua hat, and the hemisphere hat’. It’s a poem about Puerto Rican bodies in physical space, a street legal vernacular ars poetica, whereby ‘poetry is the incessant beauty called/a person by an action that takes form.’ It’s a poem that tours places, languages, bicultures that serve his needs. Lower east Side to East Harlem connects Puerto Rican and black American literature where Bolitero’s run numbers, cuchifritos are fried pork, street food, Santurce is where Laviera was born and the whole performance has more to do with Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’ than social science. Because it’s about what the poet cares about.
Richard Wilbur’s ‘The Ride’ insists on historical continuities and asks what it means to keep visions breathing. He needs to be more than a craftsman, more a force from another realm close to existential despair where there really is nothing and noone out there at a time when Reagan was riding roughshod over the New Deal, Great Society America. A dreamed ride becomes a fleeting articulable inspiration, a wish that poetry really could transcend language and thought that recalls Thomas Hardy’s Christmas poem ‘The Oxen’ – ‘ another great poem in rhyming quatrains, by a disillusioned political liberal, about reluctant post-Chrsitian disbelief.’
Lucille Clifton’s ‘my dream about the second coming’ is compressed, demotic, approachable, comic, domestic, draws on the Black Arts Movement, free verse, older folk songs, stories, new directions for the American miniature and assembled sequences. They say ‘… she can be hard to anthologise, since her poems gain power when they need not stand alone.’ Her Mary ‘ asks us to take a special interest in the female body not as a site for potential autonomy, liberated from everyone and everything else, but as a locus of nurture and interdependence, a source of life that is not hers alone.’
Carla Harryman’s ‘Possesion’ is a prose poem or not – it’s an experimental fiction like out of Donald Barthelme, an advanced psychology experiment, series of dream jokes and scenario for a Dada play from a San Franciso Bay area that rejects closure. ‘The partialness of the framing is part of the art form, and an indispensible part, since this kind of art requires the audience to try constantly to categorize and frame, while never being totally successful. Things unframed gradually become framed, and through the piece there is at each moment some partiale framing… It is this partial local coherence that holds the piece together and … holds our attention.’
John Hollander’s ‘Songs and Sonnets’ is the usual title of Donne’s lyric poems about erotic love – do we forget them as empty temples, styles pass é, words of courtship ‘hung aloft’, unreachable, unused ? Hollander takes a long breath and ‘attempts a long view.’ Poems aren’t tombs but follies to be explored. Romantic love itself is a convention – looking at hot naked people reflects the way we have learnt to look. ‘… we find ways to enjoy older models without trying to make any one of them stand, nakedly, for the whole history of poetry, let alone for the truth about love.’
Carl Dennis’s ‘More Music’ goes to the middlebrow, defends the compromise, the affable, the conversational, settlings, muddling throughs, the middle tones of ordinary speech. Accommodation walks a way with no bones broken and refuses to make a list of what could have been better and more deserved. ‘Writing about how we miss our lives, how we might like what we get, how we might settle, Dennis has landed on reasons we might not.’ There’s ‘the omniscience of regret’ here. ‘Complete satisfaction, however, belongs to the dead.’
Liam Rector’s ‘Saxophone’ repeats ‘money’ as a trauma, includes Ezra Pound who believed in the fringe economic theory of Major CH Douglas who ‘proved congenial to anti-Semites and fascists, including Pound himself’ so Rector asks what’s not for sale and hire when everything is. ‘It would not be wrong to see the irregular, constant repetition in Rector’s poem a cri de Coeur, a blast of feedback, a loud protest against the experience of life under capitalism.’ ‘We are all prositutes’ as Vic Godard sang. Money falsely represents, just like some words. Can jazz save us, a music of improv, a ‘splitting the night’ worth blowing money on?
Czeslaw Milosz ‘s ‘Incantation’ has a grand career with Heaney quoting half in the New York Times Book review in 2001 because Heaney said the lines ‘… express the fundamental beliefs upon which the fight against racism must be based… It is thrilling to hear the ideal possibilities of human life stated so unrepentantly and unambiguously.’ The poem projects an apocalypse, another world into this one. Americans wanted to see him as a survivor of terror regimes in USSR, Latin America, Eastern (Central sic) Europe, as some kind of witness, but Milosz in 1987 wrote: ‘Perhaps some Western writers are longing for subjects provided by spasms of historical violent change, but … we natives of hazy Eastern regions, perceive History as a curse and prefer to restore to literature its autonomy, dignity and independence from social pressures’. So ‘Incantation’, according to Clare Cavanagh ‘… builds bridges between pasts – his own, his nation’s, and that of the human race as such…. To change breadeaters into angels, to save the species itself and restore its true homeland, the fallen earth.’ The poem for Burt is an escape into poetic reason. It defends ‘ philosophical idealism, a vision of the apocalypse, the idea of a truly international poetry, and unicorns.’ It’s a dignified international English the translation by Pinsky and Milosz , the sort Tom Paulin decries.
Robert Grenier’s ‘Shoe From The Waves’ goes ‘oh he got a shoe from the waves.’ A Californian writer writing out of San Mateo County beaches and Bolinas where he and Creeley and friends lived in the 70’s and 80’s, part hippie and part avant garde with Saroyan, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Joanne Kyger stealing roadsigns so outsiders couldn’t find it, he takes an anti-analytical style which is about being not doing. It slides to Taoist or Buddhist effects, or marijuana cannabis ‘eyeballs getting baked’ poetry like one wet show not two dry ones. So if there’s a worry this might not be a poem, it is ‘present-at-hand’ as Heidegger might say, a readymade maybe like Duchamps or Wiliam Carlos Williams ‘This Is Just to Say.’ Say. His ‘Sentences’ of 1978 comprised of 500 index cards with a single sentence or sentence fragment to be read in any order. His latest involves words written in his nearly unreadable handwriting that can’t be duplicated in print. A Minimalist like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Aram Saroyan, he casts attention on the featureless empty air, the ‘negative space’ of a page. For Grenier, ‘ the more fully and finally legible a poem is, the less compelling.’ Bolinas was for Kevin Opstedal ‘the last holdout’ for the countercultural way. Grenier’s now in Vermont. Go to this poem, says Burt, as you go to the beach. See what others have found, and get ready for a surprise.
Rita Dove’s ‘Lightnin’ Blues’ is about a daddy. He’s got to go fishing if he can help it and it roams and plays with irony and narrative brevity, has a trick ending, endures with the pastoral appeal and releases itself from the constraints of racism and race. It isn’t a blues. It’s a design that features blue. ‘ I was playing a lot of music, everything from lightnin’ Hopkins to older… like Larry Jackson or some of the recordings that Al Lomax made of musicians… all the way up to Billie Holiday, stopping about the 50’s…’ says Dove about the poem. The future is where we ‘fixed the bait himself.’ Parodies of a new father go through. And noone will get to go fishing despite the planning, because planning makes him a ‘paper man’ and a paper man is a jazz musician who can’t improvise. ‘But the poem ends up sadder … since neither security nor pleasure can be reliably had: a falling tree might have crushed the car if not for the dumb luck (the good luck) of being stopped by the police; the “Kingfish” is a white entertainer pretending to be a foolish black man.’ America is never colour blind. ‘Thomas and Beulah… literally have to go back home, but only because a tree blocks their road.’
A.R. Ammons’ ‘Target’ models his poems on unfamiliar, math intricate shapes, patterns of intricate randomness, ‘a series of Cartesian-coordinate graphs’, where we can read it as a visual exercise, but that’d be a mistake because it’s about human life and death. There’s a glint of modernist poetry, Williams’ ‘Young Sycamore’ and it works as a silent movie until the last line when suddenly the leaf dives. If the leaf is a life it’s an odd one. It’s alert to counterintuitive nature, neatly mimetic, mixes local chaos in its ordering and has more to say than its single leaf suggests. It seeks unlikely symmetries ‘thinking like a photographer, or like the serious painter he also was.’ Suddenly there was no God in charge of things. Instead of Pentecostal, Baptist, Methodist creeds we have intricate balances. The poem ‘has no verbs of feeling, no subjunctives, no imperatives, no verbs of anything other than the present indicative (unless you count verbal adjectives). The leaf doesn’t have the ground as its target and this let’s us contemplate our own lives, as we watch.
Yusef Komunyakaa’s ‘Facing It’ is a Vietnam response, ‘by far the best-known, most often cited American poem about the war in Vietnam.’ Elizabeth Wolfson writes about Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial:
‘ Lin’s design proved instantaneously divisive. Many veterans , politicians, critics, and the general public read its refusal to explicitly glorify the war or frame the listed soldier’s sacrifice in recognizably heroic terms as an ideological statement, proof of Lin’s – and the memorial’s – purported anti-war position.’
This poem defends the monument. ‘Poem and wall together contemplate the almost frightening power of memory and mourning, the way the dead can haunt the living through loneliness, incomprehension, or survivor guilt.’ De Man thought poems erased readers, turning them into tombs. But Robert Ekiss writes that in ‘Facing It’ the poet “ mistakes the woman’s gesture for a futile attempt to remake the past, but then changes his mind, and ultimately sees… an act of motherly tenderness.” It’s a defence of poetry, helping the living see one another’s faces.
