MARK DOTY'S "MY ALEXANDRIA"

Why review a book that was published almost twenty years ago? Because it's one of the magical poetry books of our time. Because most poets don't have a common literary foundation in contemporary poetry, and  often complain about mediocrity while ignorant of those magical "slender volumes." 

My Alexandria is regarded as Doty's best book. It's the collection that made him famous. It's a treasury of gorgeous poems that are rich in affection for the self and for everything he encounters – perhaps that's why this book is so charismatic. In our ironic age, he sides with ecstasy. In a bleak, minimalist climate, he dares risk feeling and beauty, even an excess of beauty. Once in a while he slips into too much detail, but we must forgive him: the gift he gives the reader is so large.

I was thinking what it reminded me of, that interweave of so many different strands in Doty's longer poems, and suddenly remembered that I first encountered it in Rilke’s Duino Elegies. To be sure, Doty's angels are drag queens, but the richness of the interweave and the search for the transcendent are similar.

Rilke’s influence shows itself in various ways, including a way of looking at time. In “Night Ferry,” Doty writes:

I love to stand like this,

where the prow pushes blunt into the future,

knowing, more than seeing, how

the surface rushes and doesn't break

but simply slides under us.

But time is not the main subject of this volume. Rather, it’s the city – artifice, illusion, the beautiful transvestites. For Doty, this is enchantment.  He’s close to nature and animals, but his love for the city, especially for New York, is primary in My Alexandria. New York is for him what Paris was for Baudelaire and Alexandria for Cavafy: the city is poetry itself, “my false, my splendid chanteuse.”

While "Chanteuse" isn't as successful as "Esta Noche," if you skip the preliminary details and start in the middle of page 26, with the drag queen, the poem’s captivating music begins to unfold, a magic interweave of narrative and meditation:

her smoke burnished, entirely believable voice, 

the sequins on her silver bolero

shimmering ice blue. Cavafy ends a poem

of regret and desire -- he had no other theme

than memory’s erotics, his ashen atmosphere –

I'm dazzled by this paratactic leap into Cavafy. And what other poet would dare this transfiguration, when Doty describes the city while it’s raining:

The rooftops were glowing above us,

enormous, crystalline, a second city

lit from within.

Doty is full of marvelous seductions and surprises. This is the opening of “Lament-Heaven,” the last poem that could stand next to one of Rilke’s Duino Elegies.

What hazed around the branches

late in March was white at first,

as if a young tree’s ghost

were blazing in the woods,

a fluttering around the limbs

like shredded sleeves. A week later,

green fountaining,

frothing champaigne;

against the dark of evergreen,

that skyrocket shimmer. I think

this is how our deaths would look,

seen from a great distance

Poem after poem provides a ravishing interweave of personal narrative and lyricism.

“Bill’s Story” alone is worth the price of the book. So is “Brilliance,” “No,” a fabulous poem about a turtle, and “Lament Heaven.” “Almost Blue,” “Esta Noche,” “Days of 1981” (the image of the lopsided valentine heart is perfect), “Fog,” “The Advent Calendars” come close. But then there are no weak poems in this volume, unless the overlong “Wings” (the Rilkean angel now a little boy with snow shoes flung over his back).

In this age of attention deficit, it takes daring to write long poems. In the face of trendy bleakness and the poetics of ugliness, it’s a miracle that we have a poet who believes in “an art / mouthed to the shape of how soft things are, / how good, before they disappear.”

I wonder what makes this so enchanting. One factor may be his love for the city. These are the poems of a man who is happy, and happily in love. My Alexandria consists of love poems, but not to Doty’s partner (unless "Fog" -- maybe). They are love poems to the city, mainly New York. And to the exuberantly daring and creative gay culture, and to the world in general.

I like it that Doty doesn't hammer away at the fact that he is gay. It's just part of the picture, and not even the most important part. I think his worship of beauty comes first, and his ability to see beauty everywhere.

Doty makes paratactic leaps, but there is a more elementary poetic technique that he uses. It's an interweave of the ordinary and the transcendent. He gives us flowers -- or birches coming into leaf, or the crystal-hung roofs of New York during rain -- and he gives us a simple narrative (sometimes two or three simple narratives). The limitless factors (imagination, music, poetic imagery) are balanced with the limiting factors (story and structure).

Doty’s worship of beauty is unapologetic. Modernity is often equated with the poetics of ugliness – what I call the "meat packing-plant poems." I mean those poems that wallow in “realistic” detail, preferably ugly, and never provide a contrasting element. It's not "By the road to the contagious hospital" -- and then the description of early spring. It's all a grim description of the hospital.

But I realize that a typical bad poem of today is not really an example of the school of "social realism." The majority case is still a trite poem about spring (or autumn, another season that inspires thousands of bad poems) that stays entirely in the realm of the transcendent.

Doty invokes the transcendent, but also gives up the image of the girl violinist pushing her glasses back whenever she pauses. This prosy detail grounds us in the human, the real, the imperfect. We have to accept the whole package.

As in thousands of other poetry volumes, there is pain, loss, and mortality on almost every page of My Alexandria. But there is also an amazingly buoyant feel to this collection, a cosmic optimism:

And if one wave breaking says

You’re dying, then the rhythm and shift of the whole

says nothing about endings, and half the shawling head

of each wave’s spume pours into the trough

of the one before,

and half blows away in spray, backward, toward the open sea.


**

~ review by Oriana

TONY HOAGLAND’S DONKEY GOSPEL: HUMOR WITH DEPTH

. . . you feel the faint grit

of ants beneath your shoes,

but keep on walking

because in this world

you have to decide what

you’re willing to kill

Tony Hoagland points out in “Candlelight,” with his usual in-your-face ruthlessness. He does not aspire to the timeless and the mysterious. He aims for penetrating social commentary, and he does it brilliantly.

Tony Hoagland is, among other things, a salutary contrast to Billy Collins. Both use humor, but in Tony's poems, you can't miss the underlying seriousness. In fact, at his best, he is one of the poets who, like Robert Cording, teach us seriousness and grappling with large issues (though I admit it’s only at times that Tony is at his deep and startling best). Where Billy Collins monotonously undermines each poem by turning it into a joke, Hoagland knows how to use humor to say shock us into thinking and feeling. He also knows when not to use humor, since you can go only so far that way. Some of the best poems in this slender and near-perfect volume are perfectly straight, dark and sad and painfully honest.

My favorites include “Mistaken Identity,” “Reading Moby Dick at 30,000 Feet,” “Beauty,” “Lucky,” “Auden,” and “Lawrence.” “Medicine” and “The Confessional Mode” need to be read for more details about the speaker's mother, whom we encounter first in the masterpiece of this volume, “Mistaken Identity.” “Lucky” is another mother-son poem, astonishing in its daring – savage, terrifying, and true.

I also recommend “Honda Pavarotti,” a wonderful statement about art, and “Replacement,” about the coarsening and cruelty that are the required part of male adulthood. Indeed, cruelty, both toward the self and others, is one of the major themes of this volume; it is a magnificent surprise to find, in the last poem, “Totally,” the statement, “But I won’t speak cruelly of myself.”

I am especially interested in poems of dramatized imagination, such as “Mistaken Identity,” and “Benevolence,” which begins, "When my father dies and comes back as a dog" -- a startling reminder of Jack Gilbert's poem about his dead wife’s coming back as a Dalmatian, but very different in emotional tone and details, dramatic and unforgettable.

I also admire the way that Tony is not afraid to make cultural comments without being paralyzed by the fear of political incorrectness. This is where humor helps a lot -- it's difficult not to like someone who makes you laugh. But, again, this volume is hardly limited to humor. We even get lyricism, for instance in the poem “From This Height,” describing being in a hot tub:

We don’t deserve pleasure

just as we don’t deserve pain,

but it’s pure sorcery the way the feathers of warm mist

keep rising from the surface of the water

to wrap themselves around a sculpted

clavicle or wrist. (p. 50)

-- though it’s later on that we get the full reward, when Hoagland ponders all the labor that went into delivering this experience: “Down inside history’s body, / the slaves are still singing in the dark; / the roads continue to be built” (p. 51).

What deepens these poems is precisely that awareness of the price of everything, of the suffering underneath the thin surface of pleasure, of how much rage and boredom has to be suppressed for daily life to go on. Indeed we don’t often see

a housewife erupting

from her line at the grocery store

because she just can’t stand

the sameness anymore

We may not have ever witnessed this eruption, but that inner scream exists in us all, a silent howl.

There are also some memorable observations about illness:

Daydreaming comes easy to the ill:

slowed down to the speed of waiting rooms,

you learn to hang suspended in the wallpaper,

to drift among the magazines and plants,

feeling a strange love

for the time that might be killing you.

. . .

suffering itself is medicine

and to endure enough will cure you

of anything.

Hoagland has the kind of depth that comes from both intelligence and suffering. His humor is intelligent; it's designed to make us think and actually suffer a little. Because of its humor, this book may at first appear glib. But don't be deceived -- it is full of awareness of human suffering. 

Frankly, given my usual dislike of conversational-tone poems, I am astonished to find myself enjoying Donkey Gospel more and more each time I return to it. It could be because of finding passages of unexpected lyricism (e.g. “and the almond trees/ drop their white petals of applause”). But I think it's mainly because Tony Hoagland's Angel of Reality (or call him the Angel of Ruthless Perception) is moderated by the depth and seriousness of the Angel of Love and Death. There is humor in these poems, yes; but there is also wisdom. 

As in all memorable poetry, there are surprises here, especially the surprises of affirmation, of finding our messy lives actually worth living. These are the last lines of “Totally,” the last poem in the book:

The defoliated trees look frightened

at the edge of the town,

as if the train they missed

had taken all their clothes.

The whole world in unison is turning

toward a zone of nakedness and cold.

But me, I have this strange conviction

that I am going to be born.

**

POST-SCRIPT

In May 2010 issue of Poetry, Peter Campion reviews Tony Hoagland's Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (Graywolf Press. $15.00.) 

Let me quote the second part of the review.

That [rhetorical] plotting is evident everywhere. For example, Hoagland tends to tie off his poems with summations that often sound, despite their hard-won and tough-love tones, like tidy morals. Here’s a nearly random sample of endings:

—But that is how you build your castle.
That is how one earns a name 
like Jason the Real.
         —From “Jason the Real”


All that talk about love, and  This
is what that word was pointing at.
         —From “Love”


That was part of the composition.
That was the only kind of freedom
we were ever going to know.
         —From “Jazz”


That was the plot.
That was our marvelous punishment.
         —From “Voyage”

Hoagland may often advertise his spontaneity with goofy imagery and phrasing, but in these passages he points you to the meanings of his own poems with all the rigid authority of a traffic cop. He may often play the naïf or the anti-intellectual, and yet he’s much more comfortable in the world of categorical signs and markers than in the thick of actual experience. As his commentary piles up and his tactics of argument repeat themselves, you begin to suspect that this poet has never had an experience for seven seconds without beginning to structure it into a clever little speech. 

Oddly, this is the very narratorial distance that Hoagland isolates and questions in his fine essay, “Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” when he discusses a certain type of contemporary poem dominated by irony. The trouble with such a poem, he explains, is that it remains  safely told by a narrator who operates at an altitude above plot, narrating from a supervisory position. . . . It is distinctly externalized. Distance is as much the distinctive feature of the poems as play; distance, which might be seen as antithetical to that other enterprise of poetry—strong feeling.

Reading Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, I found myself wondering: Is the flaw here that Hoagland writes the very same poetry that he complains about in his essay? Is the problem with Hoagland’s rhetoric simply the distance that it creates between the poet and his subjects?  I don’t think so. From Horace through Pope to Auden, great poets have long depended upon rhetorical distance. At times their imagery even seems clearly subordinate to their argument, and the people in their poems appear like those “personifications of abstract ideas” that Wordsworth railed against. And these are still great poets.

What makes Hoagland’s rhetoric feel so “rhetorical” in the pejorative sense, is the almost total lack of music. This absence contributes to the ease with which these poems can be summed up by pat phrases. It’s not just that those formulas of argument become monotonous. When you turn, for example, from “Hinge” to the next poem in the book, “Foghorn,” you encounter this opening:

When that man my age
came towards me in the fast-food restaurant
with his blue plastic cafeteria tray

and stood next to the table where I sat alone
(there was no place else to sit),
I looked up at him in welcome.

The lineation has no tension, the nouns and verbs exert no sway because they have so little particularity, and the voice itself remains one of ingratiating chatter tempered with mild menace, like the voice of Leave It to Beaver’s Eddie Haskell. This is Hoagland’s predominant mode. As a result, and despite the handful of fine poems, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty never offers the depth of feeling, tone, and thought that its thematic ambitions lead us to expect.

*     *     *

ORIANA:


I almost, almost said that something is missing in Hoagland's work, something that prevents it  from being great poetry, and that something is music. But somehow I had a failure of nerve: I simply didn't want to say anything negative in a review meant for Amazon. Now I see it more clearly: there isn't enough interweave with the limitless. Music is a particularly powerful limitless factor. 

Music and imagery will not work without the limiting factors of story and structure -- that's why so much of Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, or Charles Wright simply glides out of memory, in spite of the momentary delight we may experience while reading an ungrounded, mainly "limitless" poem.

Edward Hirsch certainly has both music and imagery, but he manages to build enough limiting scaffolding (remember, it takes only a wisp of narrative) to provide a deeper satisfaction, especially as his work matures. Few volumes are as satisfying as Lay Back the Darkness, probably Hirsch's best volume to date. But then, even though we might wish for more music, Donkey Gospel is also deeply satisfying, in a different way. 

BOOK REVIEW: JACK GILBERT'S REFUSING HEAVEN

Jack Gilbert is an uneven poet, wonderful at his imagistic best, talky and preachy at his abstract worst. The chief flaw of this 92-page volume is that it contains far too many poems. Without the clutter of the so-so pieces, this could be a lean and elegant book, more in keeping with the poet’s ability to “flower by tightening.” He deserves better editing; after all, he is an important voice in American poetry, an extremely ambitious poet who tries to marry wisdom with beauty. Who else would dare conclude a poem with this statement –

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as the rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Gilbert’s unique strength is imagination, his ability to interweave the mental realm with realistic details. "Bring in the Gods" and "The End of Paradise" are among the Top Five here, as is “What Song Should We Sing.” Another interesting poem is “Trouble,” with its startling ending that blurs the boundary between reality and imagination. "The Lost Hotels of Paris," “A Thanksgiving Dance,” and “Burma” are also among my favorites, along with “Seen from Above” and "The Garden," which begins,

We come from a deep forest of years

into a valley of an unknown country

called loneliness. Without horse or dog,

the heavens bottomless overhead.

We are like Marco Polo who came back

with jewels hidden in the seams of his ragged clothes.

*

The opening of “Moreover” is simply extraordinary:

We are given the trees so we can know

what God looks like. And rivers

so we might understand Him. We are allowed

women so we can get into bed with the Lord,

however partial and momentary that is.

The passion, and then we are single again

while the dark goes on.

Often, however, I like only parts of certain poems, and I wonder if we could have "fragments of Jack Gilbert" the way we have fragments of Sappho – for some poems, it would be a huge improvement. On page 30, for instance, embedded in an otherwise almost unbearable poem, with the unbearable title “’Tis Here! ‘Tis Here! ‘Tis Gone! (The Nature of Presence),” we find this gem:

The silence of the mountain is not our silence.

The sound of the earth will never be Un Bel Di.

We are a contingent occurrence. The white horse

In moonlight is more white than when it stands

in sunlight. And even then it depends on whether

a bell is ringing.

This would likely be its own poem in Gilbert’s earlier, tighter Monolithos. Likewise, this passage from “Horses at Midnight without a Moon” (p.63) could be a poem by itself.

We know the horses are there in the dark

meadow because we can smell them,

can hear them breathing.

Our spirit persists like a man struggling

through the frozen valley

who suddenly smells flowers

and realizes the snow is melting

out of sight on top of the mountain,

knows that spring has begun.

*

The volume’s central message, implied already in the title, is that this life is the real paradise. Even a minor poem can suddenly blossom with this message. After wading through the fog of the abstract beginning of “Prospero Listening to the Night” (fortunately Gilbert drops the Prospero persona in this volume – this is the only exception), we get to this:

What he is listening to is

the muteness of the dogs at each farm

in the valley. Their silence means no

lover is abroad nor any vagrant looking

for where to sleep. But there is a young

man, very still, under the heavy grapes

in another part of Heaven. There are still

women hoping behind the dark windows

of farmhouses.

*

Some readers might object that what we have here is the limited poetry of an isolated individual, someone who protests too much about the virtues of poverty and solitude. Gilbert is not going to convince anyone that finding yourself old and alone crowns the “good life.” Contrary to Dickey’s blurb on the back cover, I don’t think that Gilbert teaches us how to live and die. To most people, human connection is more important by far than the sound of the oars in the dark.

While Gilbert’s narcissism can become tiresome, the genuine beauty of his lyrical lines, when he does achieve that beauty, makes it worth the occasional annoyance with statements like “What interested him / most was who he was about to become” – because before it we could feast on

. . . Mortality like

a cello inside him. Like rain in the dark.

There are enough excellent poems and fine passages here that I'd recommend this book, especially to those readers who can forgive some abstraction and sententiousness. The beauties make it worth it. Just when you give up on a particular poem, you can come across this:

Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what

walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat

and giant sky, the sea stretching away.

**