Poet's Novels and the Poetry of Novelists

Has there ever been a really good novelist who was also a fine poet? And what about the reverse: has any decent poet ever written a good novel? Naturally, examples abound. Paul Auster wrote terse, objectivist thing-poems in the 1970s, and did yeoman translations from the French, before writing City of Glass. James Dickey was winning prizes for Buckdancer's Choice and then getting serious bucks for the movie version of his best-selling novel Deliverance. Even Melville, after all, wrote his epic quixoticism Clarel after having already written Moby Dick and Pierre; or The Ambiguities. Yet who but Susan Howe trumpets Melville's poetry? How many people who know "Dueling Banjos" also know Dickey's fighter-pilot poems? Does anybody even read, let alone care about, Auster's seemingly compelling poems? The incompatibilities of novel-writing and poetry-writing beg the question of whether there is something ecliptic about these two acts. Is there some quickening of language and attention in poetry that generates opacity in novels? When poets make the turn to writing novels, is there any hope for their poetry anymore? Poets in abundance have been good prose writers: in the twentieth century, one might point to Eliot or Pound; or nowadays, Susan Howe or Anne Carson. But they have hardly ever been good novelists as well. Thomas Hardy is one instance of a writer whose novels are great and whose poetry--utterly different from the novels--is also great. Jack Kerouac, too. And then there's the example of the hybrid productions of Paul Metcalf, neither prose nor poetry but both convincingly. This might be more important if more people read Paul Metcalf.
        Two recent publications contribute to and confound the history of poets writing novels and novelists writing poems: Gustaf Sobin's novel The Fly-Truffler (Norton, 1999) and Jim Harrison's The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon, 1998). Sobin is a fine poet, maybe one of the finest living American poets, whose granular, biomorphic, densely lyrical poems have been published with increasing frequency for the last twenty years or so. A new book of Sobin's poetry is one that I am looking forward to, unbiased, and that I will read with care when it appears (his most recent was Towards the Blanched Alphabets [Talisman House, 1998]). In addition to The Fly-Truffler, Sobin also recently published Luminous Debris (Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc) (California, 1999), a series of paleological essays on what human remnants there are to be seen in southern France, where the poet has been living for thirty-five years. Luminous Debris is a spectacular book, precisely the work one often wishes poets would write; not about poetry, poetics, or their lives, but about looking and the powers of observation that poets necessarily cultivate in relation to the places they know exceptionally well. Imagine if George Oppen had written a book of essays about sailing, or Ronald Johnson had written a book of essays about the Kansas prairie. There you have Luminous Debris. The Fly-Truffler is another matter altogether. Sobin has written two previous novels: Venus Blue and Dark Mirrors. I haven't read the second of these; I tried to read Venus Blue--in an act of fandom when it was published and made it through twenty pages before abandoning it. The Fly-Truffler is short and about Provence as refracted through two of Sobin's favorite topics: peculiarities of speech (in the form of an old professor who studies the dying languages of Provence), and the metaphoric and telluric facts of life, as told through the magical process of finding and eating truffles, the odoriferous tuber known as "black gold." I liked the stuff about the languages of Provence; I savored the information about truffles (you'll want to gorge on omelettes if you read this book). However, the rest of the book suffers the purplest of prose emulsions. The story about the aged professor and his love for the dark-haired, fawn-eyed sylph of a graduate student is one thing; the pronouncements of the professor "collapsing under the weight of Julieta's weightless gaze" is another. The ghost story of The Fly-Truffler reads quickly, is compelled by numerous ineluctible inevitibilities, but is never at any point either as subtle or as interesting as the aromatic truffles that propel this narrative. I hope Sobin makes some $$ from this book (it could be made into a romantic movie starring Gerard Depardieu); I'll keep my eyes open for the next poetry book.
        Is Jim Harrison a novelist who hammers out poems in between proofing galleys and going on hunting trips near Escanaba? Not really. In fact, Harrison began as a poet. He got an MFA for writing poetry (check out his thesis, "A Natural History of Some Poems" in Just Before Dark); his first book, Plain Song (1965), was a collection of poems; along with Dan Gerber, he was one of the editors of Sumac, a journal that in the 1960s and 1970s published Objectivist poetry, and also operated a press (that reissued Duncan's "The Truth and Life of Myth"); and he has published poetry steadily throughout his career. Just given the time he spent hanging out with Charles Olson (apostrophized as "I also spent time with Charles Olson in Gloucester but was too bent on my own obsessions to digest any of his gospel" (3) in the introduction--and this phrase, much like the title of one of his novella collections, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, is exemplary of what is good in Harrison's style), Harrison has as much right (and pedigree) to call himself a poet as any other from his generation. But it's his novels and novellas that are great. "Legends of the Fall" is eighty-nine pages of narrative brushfire. Dalva is as good a novel as any written by an American in the last forty years. If the SS Desert Island were suddenly, and for the last time ever, to toot its horn outside my window, I'd probably grab two copies of Sundog, just to be safe. I defy anyone to read that novel and still feel in a funk. Among others from Michigan whom I know, the titles of Harrison's books are traded as shibboleths, passwords into a Great Lakes elysium of which he is one-eyed Virgil. I started reading Harrison's poetry because I liked his fiction so much. No one is ever going to go to Harrison for the news that stays news, but his poetry is uniformly uncluttered, honest but not confessional, and charming in its narrative admissions. For a while, I had a broadside of Harrison's "Sketch for a Job-Application Blank" tacked onto my kitchen cupboards; I would look at it whenever I walked by. Its first lines are indelible now:

         My left eye is blind and jogs like
         a milky sparrow in its socket     (10)

Even if it were just a sparrow in the socket, the line would be surreal enough to be memorable; it's the "milky" that makes this poetry, somehow: the unusual word put in the right place. Later, he refers to the "salesman of eyes" with his velvety briefcase of "jeweled gore." Likewise I love the description of his ancestral Swedes in winter who "laughed loudly and didn't speak for days." The poem breaks up toward the end with a string of poeticisms but I guess that's the point. It is, after all, a sketch.
        There's plenty to recommend in The Shape of the Journey (which, not incidentally, is a very handsome book, with its requisite, splendid Russell Chatham watercolor on the dust jacket), perhaps the "Letters to Yesenin" most of all, a sequence of thirty meditations on the Russian poet's suicide. I would teach these poems side by side with Spicer's After Lorca, not for emphasis but for examples of how poets communicate with the dead. Harrison's Yesenin poems still feel tender more than a quarter century after they were published. One suspects Harrison staved off suicide himself by writing these poems. There's lots of booze, drugs, and despair here, not all that uncommon for American poetry, but these are mediated by sharp observation and curious speculation. Recognizing the human sentimentality for dogs, say, Harrison offers up: "Perhaps if your old dog had been in the apartment that night / you wouldn't have done it. Everything's so fragile except ropes" (219). However bathetic, for some reason I find these lines very funny. Maybe funny is why I keep reading Harrison's poetry. I like the sometimes Zen breeziness he aspires to, I like the natural world he evokes with care, but I mostly like things like poem 18 in the "Geo-Bestiary," the sequence of new work that closes this collected poems. It begins:

          I was commanded, in a dream naturally,
          to begin the epitaphs of thirty-three friends
          without using grand words like love pity pride
          sacrifice doom honor heaven hell earth

The epitaphs include: 2. O you always loved long naps; 6. O you pitiless girl missing a toe; 8. O you poet without a book; 18. Pardon me for fishing during your funeral; 19. Forgive me for thinking of your lovely ass; 20. Pardon me for burning your last book; 21. Forgive me for making love to your widow; 22. Pardon me for never mentioning you; 24. O you forgotton famous person; 32. Forgive me for keeping a nude photo of you (436-7). Harrison will keep writing novels and stories, certainly. I'm hopeful that he will be canonized, too, and that I'll be able one day to pick up his Novellas in an Everyman's edition, or better, his Novels 1970-1998 in a handsome Library of America edition. Even one such permanent gesture is likely to preserve the poetry too; from this readerly perspective, that would be a fortunate thing surely.

Lisa Lubasch's first book, How Many More of Them Are You? (Avec Books, 1999) provides occasion for several reflections. The first is that there seems to be a growing tendency in poetry toward an experimentalism which incorporates a lyric tendency within epistemological fragments and disjunctures: spots of knowledge through which the language queries its own efficacy while reaching for heights of image and emotion. I'm thinking here of poets such as Forrest Gander and Leslie Scalapino, who reach a middle ground between experiemental language and a lyric idea, albeit from different beginning points and by different means. Lubasch, through a very French lens, lyrically speaks of vegetation, form, soul, and mind: "Now presently now done, / the light goes down / in slackening folds and // curiously bent down over the tall grasses, I." Despite intrusive post-modern vocabulary ("I am sick with what I cannot say" or "Which is the way your love is anyway. / Simulacrum.") Lubasch manages to rescue her fragments from being mere floating quotes or unearned gnomic observations by sticking close to interesting images; it is when she is self-consciously "experimental" that her book of "notes" rings false or flat. The experimental quality of the book--its "notes" conceit, thinking in fragments, and attention to the inadequacies of language in the face of experience--oddly reduces the book to a single tonal and moral register. There is a self-absorption at work here that, to my mind, undoes the fragmented, notational quality of Lubasch's language.
        Accordingly, this book occasionally feels already written and already read. There is a brand of experimentalism that comes straight out of the academy these days--an experimentalism lacking a vitalizing ingredient of rebellion. Many students of the Language poets, for example, wave their banner high without carrying that particular experiment any farther than its parents did. Younger poets are noticeably complacent about influence. Students seek teachers who write in the same vein, read those poets who are thinking along the same lines, and stay within the boundaries of whatever "school" of poetry with which they have aligned themselves. Lubasch and  others--say, Lee Ann Brown or Chris Stroffolino--wear their influences on their sleeves; it's as if the idea of influence, displayed in the effort to control and to provide keys for the text by using epigraph or acknowledgment, has become itself a trope for this insular situation of poetry and poetic theory. Behind the text is another poet's ideas and another poet's text and, importantly, another poet's audience, which may or may not still exist.
        Though Lubasch borrows heavily from Artaud, his fierce research into the self does not bear mere repeating; as Marx rightly points out, historical--or textual--repetition leads to a shift in genre and tone. What is destructive and anti-self in Artaud becomes wistful and self-reflexive in Lubasch, via the intervening literary theories and poetries since the 1920s and 1930s. Yes, of course, past and present figures read over our shoulders as we work out our experiments, but sometimes we have to tell them to stand down. Lubasch ought to have more intensively questioned the question posed in her wonderful book title. 

         They burn everything I have, or what little
         I have. I don't care, etc.

         The poem supreme, addressed to
         emptiness--this is the courage

         necessary. This is something 
         quite different.

           --Robert Creeley, "The Dishonest Mailmen"

As has often been observed, poetry offers publishers "cultural capital" or prestige; in other words, it is not really a viable commodity. If such is the case for poets who have received accolades and developed their own modest audience, it is even more so for those just starting out. Given the paucity of readership--at least, according to the units in which publishers typically tally their sales--it would be difficult for a press to justify publishing a first book except as an act of generosity. 
           As a solution to this quandary, publishers have relied increasingly on first-book awards, and the advantages of such a system are fairly clear. In the first place, the publisher collects "entry fees" to offset the production expense. In the second place, a prestigious judge raises the visibility of the book selected, and absolves the editors of the drudgery of reading manuscripts themselves. Finally, the award may itself gain a reputation for excellence, and thus an audience. 
        Because such advantages render the publication of first books a viable proposition, they cannot be easily dismissed. However, it is worth noting the corollary disadvantages that have accompanied this system. Most significantly, it divests the publishers and editors of first books of much investment in--or enthusiasm for--their own products. One would imagine that when celebrity laureate X chooses the groundbreaking manuscript of astonishing young poet Y for editor Z of whatever press, the latter may confront Y's text with apathy, bewilderment, or distaste. And though the said editor is nevertheless obliged to publish and distribute the manuscript in a specified period of time, no provision can be made for the care and sensitivity with which this is done. As a result, young poets often find that they are not consulted concerning cover design or typography, and are often unhappy with the results. 
        Another consequence of first-book awards concerns the manner in which they influence the writing practices of younger poets. Confronted with a slush-pile of entries, judges tend to select manuscripts which exhibit a sophisticated, signature style. As a result, there is an excitement to the refreshing yet modest stylistic innovations one often finds in such winners. But such a selection process must surely affect the writing choices of MFA students. I would argue that "workshop poetry"--far from the connotations that critics such as Charles Bernstein have attached to the term--could now be typified in terms of a surface dazzle, an acuity regarding the sleight-of-hand subversions derived from Language poetry presented with some pretense to elegance (mix with typographic eccentricities and under-cook).
        There are first-book awards of notable integrity, derived mostly from a judicious selection of judges. Though its winners occasionally leave me cold, the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition has an impressive track record. More recently, the Barnard New Women Poets Prize has proved exciting: in 1997 Brenda Hillman chose Larissa Szporluk's Dark Sky Question, in 1998 Lyn Hejinian chose Jena Osman's The Character, and last year Heather McHugh selected Christine Hume's Musca Domestica. In such cases, first-book competitions can function as a barometer of interesting new writing. Too often, however, the significance of any single award is diluted through the sheer quantity of such prizes, and a winning poet often faces unexpected difficulty in attempting to publish a second book. Regardless of such issues, one might finally question whether poetry should be presented as a competition, or whether it is anathema to apply the rhetoric of spelling bees and sporting events to creative labor by referring to books as "winners."

Bill Berkson does not have the cartoonish humor of Ron Padgett, or the deadpan directness of the late Joe Brainard. Because of this lack of a signature style, Berkson is often overlooked--even by devotees of the second-generation New York School with which he is associated. Yet his latest collection, Serenade: Poetry and Prose 1975-89, offers many pleasures--not least of which is its easy movement between quotidian detail and a more abstract, thicker diction. Take, for example, "Drill" (presented in its entirety):

          Fixed breakfast
          Patch on an old shoe

          Wild oats stiffen
          Foxtails stick

          Skylight
          Walleye

          Webs
          Whisked

          Scramble
          Disperse

          Wistful
          She's querulous

          Hills
          A fanbelt clouds

          I allow as how
          I recommend

          "A pox on you"
          The videotape crew          (43)

The poem hovers on the edge of daily life, and suggests the day's beginnings through a series of phonemic transformations (such as stick to whisk to wist). "Walleye" perhaps embodies what is at work here--denoting both the fish being cooked, and the slightly askew perspective. In other places, Berkson writes in a more directly diaristic mode, and allows for a more prolific accumulation of details: 

        Dutch paint clay pipes. A stable margin of slow to no-go crams
        now old clamshell full of butts. Big downpisser rain of pre-
        winter natural. Today normally my sinuses would ache. They
        just hit on another cigarette. No ache in sight and I am not
        the victim to search for symptoms, regularly checking the
        landscape in hopes of seeing what I keep reassuring myself is
        not there. Search me, and the other gigantic stare pursuing
        an image presumably in the studio mirror unless naturally you
        do such work by memory with eyes closed, in which event
        bypassing the exact outer image marginally in favor of a funny
        kind of--is it psychological?--replacement. A colorplate
        anyway. Displaced.                               (76)

In such passages, Berkson manages to be casual in tone while maintaining a sharp and swift movement to the poem--a movement which derives momentum from his mind's restlessness. He often exhibits considerable skill in constructing his poems, but with equal frequency forgoes what we recognize as craft in order to proceed on "nerve" (as O'Hara would say). Such an approach demands that Berkson himself remain interesting--a criterion which can seem minimal, yet proves rare enough in life (a fact which many younger imitators of the New York School would do well to learn). In Serenade, the results are quite satisfying. 

Although she's been publishing poetry and prose at a fairly steady clip for the last quarter century, the past year appears to be something of an annus mirabilis for Fanny Howe. In addition to the high-profile volume of Selected Poems published earlier this year by the recently inaugurated "New California Poetry" series of the University of California Press, committed readers might like to get their hands on two collections published further from the mainstream in 1999.  The handsome chapbook Forged, put out by Simone Fattal's Post-Apollo Press (35 Marie Street, Sausalito CA 94965), is a twenty-three-page poem sequence, which seems to be Howe's preferred mode. This sequence, which is not included in the Selected Poems, involves a seamless pairing of the specific landscape of London and its environs with a more abstract meditation on the meanings implicit in its title. In this zone somewhere between London and the self, Howe renders versions of simple but unanswerable metaphysical questions: "Did I have faith or was it hype" and "Did I believe or was it hope." Invariably, the question is followed by a forging ahead in spite of, or even because of forgery--"hope" against "hype."  The remarkable last poem in the sequence encapsulates this making-do, and harnesses a good deal of its energy from the pun on "forge," in which the verb suggests counterfeiting a signature, while the noun conjures the annealing atmosphere of a blacksmith's workshop:

          Grind and forge
          for minimal spark and speed

          Time is so intimate

          then it is finished
          and on you go burning to a cinder
          a forgery in figure only
          signature cut to the wheels.   (23)

       The riddling tendency of Howe's verse is a source of a certain pleasure for many readers, but it may also explain why there has been less critical attention paid to her writing than one might expect.  The bland certainty of statements such as "Time is so intimate / / then it is finished" proffers a different kind of difficulty from what we have come to expect from "difficult" poetry. Another way of putting this would be to say that the inviting generosity of her poems can seem at odds with the quick turns and somersaults one ends up doing to keep up with them. One gets the sense that there aren't enough critics (academic or otherwise) out there willing to do the work of matching these kinds of mental gymnastics, which veer into phonetic and syntactical ambiguity while retaining a steady grip on the personal voice and private experience.  Howe fuses the tactics and strategems of what might be called "traditional" Language poetry with a radical, unembarrassed confidence in her lyric self--even as she lets her poems tailspin out of her hands--and this fusion perplexes a critical industry that insists on honoring the presumed incompatability of these modes.
         Spectacular Diseases #11, entitled "A Folio for Fanny Howe," clearly sets out to rectify this critical neglect by publishing essays that both advocate and evaluate Howe's writing. This issue pairs another recent poem sequence, entitled "Q" (which is included in the Selected Poems, and sections of which first appeared in Chicago Review 42:1), with essays on her writing by Rae Armantrout, Paul Green, Romana Huk, Peter Middleton, and Clair Wills. I found Romana Huk's essay on aspects of negative theology in Howe's poetry especially useful (there you'll also find an especially helpful comparison between Howe and Louise Glück), and was intrigued by Clair Wills's discussion of Howe's Catholicism, which leads to another useful comparison, in this case with Belfast poet Medbh McGuckian. While all of these essays are fairly academic in tone, they are for the most part self-reflexively so. This means that they provide useful cues and clues towards a critical apprehension of Howe's corpus without overwhelming the poetry with apparatus. "At least I know my traditions are among the contradictions," Howe writes in a line from "Q," acknowledging the taxonomic difficulty of situating her poetry (and herself?)--this collection of essays goes a long way towards getting at those traditions and contradictions. 
        All told, with the Selected Poems providing a solid introduction to a good bit of representative work that's gone out of print, with Spectacular Disease offering cues for approaches to Howe's work, and with Forged marking the last known direction of Howe's course, the intrigued reader has no excuse: get your hands on one of these books, and get cracking. 

N.B. Spectacular Diseases #11 is "the irregular house publication" of Paul Green's imprint, also known as Spectacular Diseases, and is available via Small Press Distributors, 1341 Seventh St., Berkeley CA 94710-1403.  The editorial address is 83(B), London Road, Peterborough, Cambs., PE2 9BS, United Kingdom.

CORRECTION

Dear Geoffrey,

Thomas Meyer informs me of some news and a few corrections regarding my review of his new selected poems At Dusk Irridescent (Highlands, N.C.: Jargon, 1999) in CR 46:1. The news is that the entire text is available in a searchable format as a PDF file on the Jargon website (jargonbooks.com), which means that eager readers with adequate bandwidth can download the entire (handsome) text and print it for free (which is a steal!). As for the corrections: 1) only about a fifth of the 250-page collection previously appeared in Meyer's other Jargon books; 2) "Rilke" translates and conflates part of the Sixth Duino Elegy, along with most of the First Duino Elegy; 3) "Venetian Epigrams" consists of "tracings" (Meyer's word) of the early Goethe poem of the same name; 4) "Trois Baguettes" is not influenced--as I seem to indicate, though unintentionally--by Jack Sharpless, who was in college in 1972 when it was written. I had evoked Sharpless for the sake of sonic context, not intending to indicate influence.

       Best Wishes,
       Peter O'Leary

We continue to welcome critical comments, observations, announcements, complaints, or letters to the editor, and would consider publishing them in this section. Write to Geoffrey Treacle & friends by sending a letter to Chicago Review, 5801 S. Kenwood Avenue, Chicago IL 60637-1794; or send an e-mail to Geoffrey at chicago-review@uchicago.edu.