In Russell Hoban’s grim, post-apocalyptic fantasy and moral fable Riddley Walker, the eponymous character is a member of a warrior-priest caste, whose job, along with defending the tribe, is explaining the ancient mysteries of the past, imbuing with meaning the scraps and bits of their largely illl-understood history and the history of pre-apocalyptic England. He is, in his own words, a “connexion-man,” one who strings together disparate bits of cultural detritus, historical documents, oral tradition, and provisional tribal knowledge into exhibitions that are part religious ritual, part recovery and translation of long lost scientific and historical facts. To the reader, who knows more than Riddley, what results is bizarre, sometimes comical, sometimes chilling, and always just a bit off-kilter. To call a poet a “connexion-man” is an old move. The poet synthesizes artifacts from cultural material, both base and rare, and whether he writes epics or brief lyrics, he makes connections, illuminating (or complicating) the space between the words, and interrogating the intersections of personal and national history, and thought and action. W.S. DiPiero writes a surprisingly readable review-essay on Basil Bunting, that near-forgotten Poundian, devoting most of his nine pages to the circumstances surrounding the composition of “Briggflats” and to praising small excerpts from that and other Bunting poems. I resisted Basil Bunting when I first read him (preparing for my oral exams just a couple years back) but DiPiero (who Jonathan at Bemsha Swing seems to hold in mild contempt) manages to encourage me to take another look.
Albert Goldbarth is the single contemporary poet who comes to mind when I think of the poet as “connexion-man,” not because he’s so good at it, but because his attempts to shoehorn so much seemingly disparate (but not really!) material into a single “poem” nearly always fail for me because they are so obviously engineered, so transparent in their attempts to achieve profundity that this reader just can’t buy it, that is if sheer boredom in the face of AG’s logorrhea doesn’t cause me to propel the book across the room before poem’s end. Rarely does his chosen subject(s) propel me to finish the poem. His piece in this issue of Poetry, “Cock,” then, actually surprised me for its readability. The best lines in this poem are quotations lifted from Darwin, mostly, which at least confirms Goldbarth’s ability as a pretty good excavator of others’ choicest bits. Take, for example:
—on the island of San Pedro, where the Beagle was anchored
awaiting him—he would be sneaking up on a fox
“of a kind very rare” and donking it stoutly
“on the head with my geological hammer.”
Okay, I’ll grant that the lively verb choices here are Goldbarth’s, but without Darwin’s notes, this passage would amount to much.
The poem continues to describe various instances of “heresy” and laments those narrow-minded and scared enough to condemn those who are different. Nothing new here, though Goldbarth manages to hit some nice notes in places, choosing stories that, while ringing a bit too familiar (the Cock who was executed for crowing on Sunday, the mis-accused witch burned at the stake) maintain this reader’s interest. The cock, though, it turns out, is merely the pivot upon which a bad joke turns in the next section, which gives us Goldbarth’s ostensible real subject: the right to marry for same-sex couples, and civil rights for homosexuals in general. While we sympathize with him, he’s clearly not comfortable with his material, and it shows in the patronizing portrait he paints of his lesbian neighbors, who belong to “The Church / of the Gay Girls” while Goldbarth himself locates his faith in “The Orthodox Congregation of Guy.” The final prosey stanza turns to a personal anecdote that comes full circle, back to Darwin in a fairly unconvincing manner. “Cock,” though not without charms, peters out.
I recall enjoying Goldbarth, or at least some of his poems, years ago, but he’s failed to impress me lately. I suppose this latest piece in poetry is a half-success. Jeff Bahr and Wil Lobko have, to name two blogroll denizens, expressed admiration for his work quite loudly on their blogs—maybe youse guys can come down here and school me a bit?
2 comments:
Have you ever read "A Canticle for Leibowitz"? It's a sci-fi book pretty similar to the Russell Hoban you begin your post with, in that it describes post-apocalyptic society's attempts to make sense of pre-boom! civilization. I had a college prof who thought very highly of it.
& What are you going to do at Poetry Dailier on days when you like the poem Poetry Daily chooses to post, I've been wondering? Like, maybe, today's poem over there isn't so bad.
I'm with you on Goldbarth, to a point. His work makes a fuss about its own bigness - so much firecrackery - and after you're wowed with a slew of shiny, weird objects & referents, he holds something up to you again, so close that you can see it despite the damage done to your retinas. But when it works, it works *so well*. As in "A World of Expectations" - it's a shell game, certainly, and even I sometimes tire of knowing that something unexpected will be shoved my way to floor me, but the final lines throw the poem into realization, etc., and win me every time. This success might have something to do with the degree of surprise, the extent to which he misleads and leads me back.
Post a Comment