Weekly Poetry/Poetics Commentary by Bob GrummanWeek Fifteen--11 May 1999
Silent But Deadly, Number 10
"Manhattan Deli," by B. Z. Niditch, to start with the poem on review that was
easiest for me to work out, is a nice journalistic evocation
of . . . a Manhattan deli. I like its comic touches, particularly the contrast of the priest's concern with his salvation
against his appetite for dessert. I have a few questions,
though. How does the narrator know that the priest is concerned
with his salvation? Or is praying for personal salvation the
main use of worry beads (about which I know little)? And who is
the "witch?" Whoever she is, characterizing her as a witch is
too dramatic to be left unelaborated on, I think.
Ma
nhattan Deli
Two elderly Jews
The next-easiest poem for me to negotiate was "forest green," by Laurie Calhoun:
artificial christmas
tree mixed
salad leaves
This poem shows talent but doesn't quite come together, for me. It
concerns various (forest) green things, most of them negatives--
but the Bible belt isn't green, is it? And what does the salad
have to do with the decay and nullity the other images suggest?
Most important, why is this standard small wasteland that's
described worth a poem? The poem needs something fresh: a new
twist of words, an unexpected metaphor or two, a novel use of
some poetic technique, traditional or burstnorm--something out of
Jonathan Levant's poem, "domesticated devil," in fact:
so i put the wife's panties into the typewriter
and wrote my head off
Levant's poem is nuts, of course--one of his inimitable jump-cut
streams-of-consciousness/ misconsciousness popping back & forth
from Ancient Greece and earlier to his wife, or from sound to
sound, or word-play to word-play, or who-knows to what-say.
At times it comes too close to silliness, as at the two spots
with parenthesized question marks and in the "so rghum" line, and
can certainly be accused of being too slapdash, arbitrary and
impulsive. But Levant's stooping "to using a dictionary to fill
a page" gives his poem structure, and the zestful largeness of
the mind he's working out of unifies its tone. And he even knits
the poem's end back to its beginning with "soiled soggy soft
words that he loved," which links to "the wife's panties."
"Soiled soggy soft" also brings the "so"-words into a nice swoosh
that ends a little further along in the penultimate word of the
poem, "sonic"--perhaps the most apt "so"öword to conclude his
word-salady journey through such words with.
What really makes his poem for me, though, are the infra-verbal
"accidents" that occur, such as "so lving" with its suggestion of
"so loving," "so living" and "so leaving," all of which make
interesting sense in the context (line 23); and the Circe that I
found in "so urce," four lines from the bottom; and the weird
revelation in "so vereign" of "foreign" in line 30. I thus rate
this poem a good one.
I rate Ficus's similar sort of blur similarly. It's apparently an untilted excerpt from a longer piece:
eased eary eaty
warm smell of
Again, there's
much risk of silliness but the poem's Joycean inventiveness more
than makes up for that: "belse" for "pulse" and "bells," for
instance, and "heavin'" for "Heaven" and "heaving." Actually,
this poem is quite unified as an evocation of drunken lust--with
"RepeTITtitTITtition" beautifully smashing a center into its
careen. There's a LOT here that I have no grip on, like
"orpimentally," but most of the "microherent words," as I call
them, suggest enough to tease rather than put off--"sucjdler,"
for instance, speaks of sucking, suckling--and, with its absurd
"j," of juice (albeit very mixed-up)--but also puts a "soldier"
ever so slightly into the picture, to set up the later image of
knights, who suggest musketeers, to me, and make the thing
Falstaffian. . . .
John M. Bennett's poem, of course, gets the prize for difficulty.
Those who keep up with his company's press releases to Newsweek,
though, will quickly pick up on the central technique here: the
fragmented mirroring of the first half of the poem with its
second half, "STARE relapse" marking the poem's center. Thus,
the first word prior to that point is "you," while the first word
after it is "your." "place" then brokenly mirrors "plate."
Three words aren't mirrored, or mirrored very clearly, but then
"wave's jackedoff moon" echoes (in reverse) "tune jagged wave."
And so on, with inexactnesses, and mirrorings other than auditory
ones, like "marking-stick" for "sign," a semantic echoing. Here's the poem:
sign nature))
"claw" stems slide of gravel toward the
Ah, you want to know what the point of all this is? It does at
first seem a little dotty, a kind of over-artful cleverness to
no real aesthetic end. But so ALL innovations in art at first
seem, and perhaps even ARE. But then their values start showing,
if they have any, and this one definitely does. Here's what I so
far claim for this technique, as used here: that it suggests a
landscape mirrored in a body of water, which fits the text; that
it suggests more exactly the way we really perceive things, not
with blindness until sudden complete identification, but in a
kind of jitter from one mistake to an opposite mistake until some
kind of synthesis of mistakes is made (along these lines, I find
the technique particularly effective at dramatizing the quiver of
heightened perception of a Central Moment in the protagnist's
experience); more abstractly, the technique demonstrates how much
existence consists of waves.
Once justified, as it is for me, the technique allows Bennett to
make intricate theme-and-variation moves; and half-give us a
picture, and withhold the other half, or near-half, till later.
So he doesn't cheat us, just makes us work--which, of course,
should increase our delight when the halves come together. It
also allows him to spin huge distortions off his images, as he
does in a multitude of other ways in this and others of his
poems--distortions that sometimes seem irritatingly arbitrary,
but more often seem brilliant--as, here, when "tooth (inside)"
distorts "in tune," which suddenly makes one aware that "in tune"
might mean not just "being correctly tuned," but being inside music. All kinds of things like this are going on in this grand
vibration of a poem, and in most of Bennett's poems. He shivers
from incomplete but telling approximation to incompleter but
tellinger approximation, and invariably overshoots his scene--to
compose a world.
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