Anthony Lombardy

ERRORS IN THE SCRIPT by Greg Williamson

EVEN AS WE SPEAK by Len Krisak

INTERROGATIONS AT NOON by Dana Gioia

Not long ago, I wandered with my wife into a lamp store, a huge room crammed with the wildest assortment of table and floor lamps. While I was clambering around, my wife was looking at something with what might have been the head of an Egyptian mummy as its base. She said "This is interesting." As I was ducking between the Elvis lamp and the pseudo-Henry Moore, I agreed, "It looks good in a lamp store." Each of us immediately knew that the other didn't want it. Many poems, too, are unusual enough to attract attention in the special environment of the literary journal, the collection, or the textbook, but are not persuasive in another context or to an audience that is not appreciative of the aesthetic milieu in which they are distinctive and intelligible. Anyone producing small artefacts for the literary household in an era of mass manufacture must contend with the challenge of making something that is sufficiently distinctive to be noticed in the midst of so many generically similar objects, without making something whose distinction is ultimately a liability, unmotivated except as a gambit, a transparent play for attention. The three poets whose books are reviewed here have made their work distinctive by eschewing novelty and cultivating an intelligent craftsmanship, by offering us nothing that is childish but much that is playful.

***

Greg Williamson's second book of poems, (Errors in the Script, Overlook Press 2001) marks a considerable advance over his accomplished first book ( The Silent Partner, Storyline 1995). The new volume is less elegiac, more skillful, and has a wider range of affect and observation. The title poem, which concludes the volume, is a sequence of eight sonnets that are unified by the persona's bemused and frustrated responses to computers, phone answering machines, and corporate nomadism, as well as absurdities of language and narrative which make the poem and the book both a send up of post-modern literary criticism and a tribute to its influence.

One of Williamson's extraordinary attributes is the ability to toss out an apparently effortless succession of metaphors, as if he were constantly challenging himself to outdo his previous thought. For example, the first poem in the collection, "Origami", describes the paper figures some school kids have made and compares them with the associations the persona makes later, at home, between "the page" and a long series of possibilities:

I head for home, where even more white lies
Take shape. The page is a window filled with frost,
An unformed thought, a thought I had, but lost.
The page is the sclera of someone rolling his eyes

As it becomes (you'll recognize the trick)
Tomorrow morning, laundry on the line,
The South Pole, circa 1929,
The main sail of the Pequod, Moby Dick,

The desert sand, the shore, the arctic waste
Of untold tales, where hero and author together
Must turn, out of silence, into the whether-
Or-not-they-find-the-grail. Not to your taste?

and so on for two more stanzas until the persona acknowledges that the pages assume "More shapes than I can keep a finger on" and he finally sits "...at my little desk in mid-July/Throwing snowballs at the Sheetrock wall."

Such poetry shows the sort of athleticism that one finds in Pindar or Rilke. It maintains an awareness of the poem as performance, while suggesting an agonistic sensibility, one struggling with itself, a struggle which may provoke readers to wonder about the emotional motives behind the performance.

The most strikingly original element of the book is a section of poems in which bold lines alternate with plain type. The bold lines, read by themselves, make an intelligible poem, as do the lines in plain type. When all of the lines are read in order, they make a third poem. Williamson calls these poems "Double Exposures." The persona here is an unusually reflective photographer with an addiction to puns and surprising juxtapositions of thoughts and images. All of the poems in this sequence are skillful, and several are affecting and startling when the complete version is read. It would take a mighty prophet to foretell if this literary form has a future, but if Williamson takes up this form again or other poets adopt it, their interest in doing so will reflect the pleasure of seeing new ways of making connections between disparate trains of thought, of seeing how the fractured fields of our attention can be made to complete one another.

In "Three sided, One-Way Mirror," another of the many ambitious poems in the book, Williamson riffs and rants for close to eighty lines, with bad puns, grammatical miscues, echoes ranging from Chaucer to Yeats and Ashbery, and an odd meter (couplets composed of alternating three and five beat lines) to keep the reader off balance. In the midst of this tirade, there are remarkable moments of clarity, including these programmatic-sounding lines:

"I re-envision my mad,
Ongoing project, my Scintilliad,
    Collecting, if you will,
In what I call a retrospectacle,
    Back glances, misdirections
    On myself, swan song
Of the silver fog...";

The poem makes an immediate impression of brilliance and interest, but in the midst of its fascination, a question recurs: what is the emotional meaning of all this brilliant word play? Perhaps this question ought to be framed by a concern that relates to all three poets being considered here: how has the development of their work been conditioned by the fact that each of them writes largely in meter in an era that is not hospitable to traditional verse forms? In Williamson's case, if his constant punning and grammatical game playing is motivated by a desire to mediate the distance between himself and the post-modern poets and critics who will respond to the displacements of semantics, grammar, and point of view which he so brilliantly provides, is it reasonable to worry that the poet is distorting and limiting his extraordinary lyric gifts for the sake of a wider contemporary readership?

Having thought about this question in the light of both of Williamson's first two books, I think it suggests a reasonable concern for the future, but not a liability in the present. Williamson's playful impulses are so demonstrably his own, that their development, however calculated, is not a distortion of his own poetic temper. Moreover, it is fortunate that a poet as ambitious and gifted as Williamson has the imaginative ability to cultivate rhetorical strategies which appeal to diverse constituencies. Of greater concern than the rhetorical motives of the poet are his psychological motives. Williamson's poems do sometimes show a certain reticence at the heart of their arguments. This reticence often contributes to the beauty and mystery of the poem, but it can also mute its emotional claims. Of continuing interest to admirers of Williamson's poetry will be the tug between the prolix and the pithy, the evasive and the incisive, the epigrammatic and the discursive tendencies in his poetry, but Williamson is a poet who has progressed so far in his art that the value of his future work is more related to his moral destiny than to his poetic inclinations. This book is a work of integrity and daring. It will reward the closest attention.

***

Len Krisak's first full length volume of poems, Even As We Speak (Evansville, 2000), the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, is a collection of skillful, accessible poems in traditional forms. It begins with a section called "Letting Go," which dramatizes the persona's feelings about his father and his own life. The following sections of the book contain a wide range of poems, including Robinson-like character sketches, meditative pieces, and a section of poems that are not translations but renditions of well known poems in other languages, including three Horatian odes. The persona behind all of these poems is, in fact, very Horatian. He represents himself as a man who, though childless, enjoys domestic pleasures and happiness, and who looks bemusedly on the pathos of life.

The most successful poems here are tactful and canny in how they show a sudden awareness of the reader. They are at home in their own conventions and resolve themselves in a satisfying way. Krisak does cultivate a very familiar set of forms and topics, and so demands of himself a level of felicity in composition, phrasing and invention that any poet would find difficult to sustain. I like best the poems in which the quotidian and emotional realities represented fall a little outside the more familiar topics which elsewhere Krisak skillfully re-visits. These qualities are present, for example, in "York Beach," "Absconditus," and "Birds From Afar," which surprised me with this description of a flock of birds:

And yet their soaring seems so blind
As dozens wheel back, swoop, and swerve,
    Like chaff that's changed its mind
    Or love that's lost its nerve.

I like that chaff changing its mind, the parallel between "chaff" and "love," the succession of consonant sounds in the last two lines. These lines also illustrate Krisak's technique. "Nerve," the object of transitive "lost" and syntactically inevitable, concludes the poem, while the not inappropriate, but slightly arbitrary and rhyme-driven, tricolon-completing "swerve" holds down the rhetorically less prominent antepenultimate line. Comparing the version of "Lot's Wife" (after Akmatova) in this volume with the versions found in print and audio on the Able Muse website reveals that in the book version Krisak has sharpened the diction and eliminated a distracting internal rhyme. Again, this is the kind of unexceptional and workmanlike move which Krisak makes habitually. Like the other two poets being reviewed, he writes like an adult. His technique doesn't fail him often. Occasionally one does encounter in this book a certain murkiness in the verse that seems to be conditioned by the form. Krisak never drowns in trope and simile, but some passages merely tread water: "A navy blue, it might have passed for black/I wore what seemed the world upon my back/As if a spy with promises to keep." ("High School Trenchcoat, Sept. 1962") Yet even the less successful poems usually reel the reader in with the last line or two, e.g., "York Beach," an affecting poem about children playing on a beach, which concludes "Will they look back with vague unease/At how the waves broke up on shore/And wonder what was summer for?" This is a skillful and rewarding book by a poet we will certainly be hearing from again.

***

In the new book by Dana Gioa, Interrogations at Noon (Gray Wolf Press 2001), a voice within the persona of the title poem rebukes him: "Who is the person you pretend to be?"/He asks, "The failed saint, the simpering bore,/The pale connoisseur of spent desire,/The half-hearted hermit eyeing the door?" This self interrogation and rebuke occur at noon, the middle of the day, not at dawn or in a romantic twilight. Section III of the book is titled "Words for Music," like Yeats's, "Words for Music Perhaps" from The Winding Stair (1933), This section contains, in addition to lyrics from Gioia's libretto for a new opera, Nosferatu, the characters of a bishop and a beggar, characters who, as for Yeats, serve as lenses which clarify—or dramatize—the issues that most concern the poet. The best poem in this section, "At the Waterfront Cafe," is written in loose four and eight beat trochaic lines, lines which remind one of a great deal of nineteenth century narrative poetry, a poetry which Gioia is known to admire. This poem is a superb piece of social satire, not its smallest triumph being the delicious turn at the end in which the poet, with a certain sweetness and generosity, declines to state explicitly the evaluation he has already so graphically shown: "But tonight I hope they prosper./Are they shallow? I don't care./Jealousy is all too common./Style and beauty much too rare."

Rilke and Seneca cast long shadows in this collection, which includes a translation of part of Seneca's Hercules Furens as well as translations and quotations from Rilke. Gioia's poetry suggests the wide range of his reading and interests, and the figures of Rilke and Seneca are not mere window dressing, but loom as polar co-ordinates for the persona behind most of these poems. Rilke is the angelic figure, the seer and hermit, while Seneca is the worldly one who confronts, in the character of Hercules, the anguish of losing everything one loves. Seneca himself, like Hercules, tried and ultimately failed to master his own fate through strength and the instruments of worldly power. Rilke, on the other hand, created an imaginative world by withdrawing from this real one. Gioia's poems persuasively dramatize their author as a Senecan figure who longs to be more like Rilke.

The poem that opens the collection, "Words," argues that "The world does not need words.../The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always." The poem reveals a program that is marked by a mystic inclination not only to dichotomize word and world but also to venerate or praise that which is greater and prior to oneself. The inadequacy of words is the theme of the first poem in the collection and of the last, "Unsaid." The theme is repeated insistently, for example, "...what matters most/Most often can't be said," ("Corner Table") or "But words are never as precise as touch." ("Long Distance").

Gioia is not bashful about drawing a moral. For example, in "The Lost Garden,"a poem about sorrow and memory, the persona speaks to an unnamed interlocutor about the "gardens" they remember, gardens where "Some other mockingbird will concertize/Among the mulberries, and other vines/Will climb the high brick wall to disappear." Although "sorrow/Seems bearable when studied at a distance," the persona sometimes plays a game in which he speculates on how things might have been different had they "walked a different path one day." After twenty lines in this vein, the final section of the poem begins "The trick is making memory a blessing/To learn by loss the cool subtraction of desire/Of wanting nothing more than what has been..." It's very bold for a poet to let his persona weigh a serious moral and psychological difficulty in familiar metaphors, and then to conclude with the colloquial "The trick is.." as if the problem had been mastered and the reader is the lucky recipient of the poet's wisdom. I say that it is bold, not because I disapprove, but because we should acknowledge when a poet is taking rhetorical risks and surviving. The conclusion of the poem, "To know the past forever lost, yet seeing/Behind the wall a garden still in blossom." succeeds, I think, because it honors the elegiac motive of the poem as a whole, while balancing it with gratitude for the past that is being elegized. This is emotionally persuasive and re-colors the phrase, "The trick is...," as a modulation, a touch of bravura, that saves the familiar images from banality.

Naturally, it's easier for iconoclasts and cranks to set up shop as moralists, because they can run riot with their contrarian impulses and say things that, however crazy, are not hackneyed or banal. For the sane or morally responsible person, banality is a danger, since, to such a person, moral truths are homely, not innovations but re-discoveries. If we are dogged enough with a line-by-line analysis of Gioia's poems, we can find lines where the generalization is too familiar: "So much of what we live goes on inside—" ("Unsaid"). What is surprising is how Gioia almost always retrieves these lines by developing from them an individual and slightly mysterious motive, as in the final line of this, the final poem of the collection: "Think of the letters that we write our dead." Gioia swings from making, apparently, no demands upon his reader, to making a tremendous demand in the final line, a demand which, if it is successful, will cause some readers to re-consider their familiarity with what has preceded. This reader found himself asking, "What letters?" and then reading the whole poem again.

Unfortunately, as I've suggested already, Gioia is taking some risks in this collection because most people don't like moralizing poetry. They dislike it for two evident reasons: first, many humans just don't like acknowledging that anyone can teach them anything; second, if moral notions are relative, many will think that the unwelcome generalizations of the moralist show only that he is intellectually naive. And there is a third, much more fundamental reason why moralizing poetry is a precarious enterprise: the moralist cannot flatter his reader. Flattery is the vice of moralistic verse, a vice which sometimes makes it popular precisely because it exemplifies and aggrandizes what people already think they know and feel. One might argue that flattery is always a vice, in poetry and in life, and this may be true, but it is one which vitiates most seriously the poet who is a moralist. Every competent rhetorician must capture the good will of his audience. Serious poets will succeed in doing so without flattering their readers too blatantly, and Gioia is one of these.

Each of these three poets marshals a rhetoric that is both distinctive and durable. In general, these are poems that are very well made, in their handling of rhythm and meter, and in the development of arguments that are intelligible and persuasive. Williamson's book seems most likely to attract the attention of a broad spectrum of critics and readers, many of whom will appreciate his brilliance of technique and argument and his wealth of invention, as well as his thematic pre-occupations, which implicate Williamson in a wide range of conversations about the value and meaning of metaphor and narrative. Gioia already has a broad and appreciative readership, and this volume is likely to consolidate opinion on his work. Krisak's poetry will appeal to those who are opening their minds to the possibilities of formal verse. I look forward to seeing Krisak explore further his more personal themes, as in the poems of this collection which have the greatest emotional force.

***

Some of the best poems here are like lamps one could readily admire and rely on, but which are easy to overlook in the crowded lamp store. If these volumes are shoved into the corner and gather a little dust at first, they seem less likely to be tossed out in a few years when their owners are looking for a new style. Relative to the free verse establishment, the new formalism has not produced many new poets in the decade or so in which it has enjoyed some prominence. Nevertheless, I believe that the few poets it has produced have served long apprenticehips in their difficult art and hold the promise of continuing development and lasting reputations. These three volumes confirm me in this belief, and I expect them to be shedding their light for a long time.

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