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MIPOesias Magazine ~ ISSN 1543-6063 Volume 15 ~ January to March 2004 |
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{Part 2} Eivaz is also an erotic poet. In a pagan situation Eros is the dependable goddess. Stated differently, if you happen to find yourself alive at a time when the society around you is flooded over with materialism, cynicism, corruption of authentic religious impulse, and scientific doubt, eros tends to become the last resort for humankind's romantic, hopeful, dreamy and mystical spirit. The primal sense of the strangeness and beauty of things flees last from sex. The Romans didn't really believe in gods but they did believe in the pleasures of the senses, they endorsed orgies, they at least preserved the mystery of Eros carried over from the Greeks. Likewise,
in the postmodern Roman kitsch of our Imperial America, the Last
Superpower, shuffling aircraft carriers over to far-flung hotspots to
protect our oil just like the Romans used to send off their legions to
protect their grain - with our generic, transplantable readymade your
chiffon follows your body (from Evening Mood) Van Gogh said "The best way to know life is to love many things" and one can see here how a sense of erotic desire, if not love, perks up the image and stokes the metaphor. Again, note the conflux of interior and exterior landscape. Clearly, the way in which the speaker describes the image of the woman he is looking at not only shows her, as a person in his exterior landscape, but also shows his subjective interior, his erotic mood. Notice, further, how within the image of the woman is carried other images, mountains, clouds -- it is as if the poet glimpses her own interior landscape which, in turn, brings with it yet another exterior landscape. Metaphor allows metamorphosis in this way, and insight is a term to be looked at literally as the poet seems to see into the things he looks at, physically and psychologically. The very line breaks of his poem appear to mimic the falling folding of a mountain range or a woman's clothes. The sense of seeing to an inside which is an outside, while hard to articulate in any clear way in prose, is suggested by the notebooks of the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins where he works out notions of something he calls "inscape": There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing… (Journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins). You can see in this journal entry by Hopkins the sense in which outside becomes inside and inside becomes outside again - the mobius strip of phenomenological reality. Eivaz shares our postmodern distrust of ideologies and rhetorical formulae such as cloud and crowd the speeches of politicians. When he steps out of voicing the image to blend in abstractions, we will see pithy aphoristic fragments fracturing regular moralistic strictures into inversions and oppositions: how
the edifice stood so long (from Protecting Our Abstractions). Thus in a reversal of the cliché equating greatness with that which is large and endures, he describes an unprotected greatness, and in opposition to the cliché equating truth with certainty, he equates truth with being unsure. This is an example of using poetry as a device for wisdom. "The limits of your language are the limits of your world," said the 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and by reordering and deconstruction received ideological clichés and recombining them into peculiar forms, Eivaz works to ease limits and make them indeterminate and fluid. His vision, when it comes to abstract statement and generality, is modest and humanist; as he writes in another poem, "4 AM," one kiss can take anyone "from power to pain," in the descending mysteries of "our small alls." The literary genre of the novel is characterized by plot, character, and drama. By contrast, the short lyric poem is characterized by moment, fracture, and singularity. A novel takes many characters through a storyline that progresses over the days. A lyric poem brings the reader into one self that may as well be his, just for a moment, which glistens, essentially storyless. There are many intermediate forms between these two opposing poles of the purely novelistic and the purely lyric. For example, the poet Stephen Dunn, who originally wrote short stories before he came to poetry, imports story/novel strategies into his poems. William Faulkner was originally a lyric poet before importing poetical strategies into his novels. Eivaz is a poet who generally does his work close to the pure lyric pole. He is better at lyric-moment effects than he is as anecdotal, story effects such as we see often in poems by Dunn, Bukowski (who wrote short stories) and Raymond Carver (better known as a story writer than a poet). Honing closer toward the lyric bone, Eivaz' poems seek to suspend a moment in light and shade, to distill an essence of dusk: the
words of twilight are sweeter (from A Mood). Instead of linear chronological progression as is typical of the plot of a novel, we have the nonlinear image of a swirl, we have a suspension into a moment out of time, freed, if only for an instant, from the incessantly grinding ongoing rigor mortis of history: "no plan / until part of it." As is frequent in his poems, here Eivaz is once again using the linebreak as punctuation. For an example of a poet who does this all the time, see W. S. Merwin: Night
when the south wind wakes the owl (W. S. Merwin, First of June). This approach to deploying the line break in order to avoid using punctuation can lead to interesting effects of suspension and breathlessness. On the other hand, I believe Merwin overdoes it, and that it can tend to lead to a cloying faux-childish tone if used ubiquitously. Elsewhere, Eivaz opens his focus up and outward and paints us gently mellow nostalgic scenes of American arts culture and bohemia: You've
seen me here before, near the wharf, (from Streetsinger) The ear for the give-and-take of casual overheard conversation is flawless in the last lines above, and give us a sense of being there, a mimesis of "what it was like," which is created as much by the sheer tug-and-thrust, stop/start of the phrasing crosscut both with punctuation and line breaks - an example of a poetic effect which has nothing to do with the meaning of the words, and everything to do with their simple physical presence as rhythmic counters, thudding across the tongue in the reader's mind: I
get by, living with Frank Can
you hear that? Whether you read it aloud or just in your head silently
with the ghostly voice of your mind, you can hear the rhythms of found
speech, street talk, ordinary, eternal. It reminds me of the spoken
urban word rhythm we see in Frank O'Hara's Lunch
Poems which .
. . and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE and
I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of (Frank O'Hara The Day Lady Died). This conversation mimesis is crucial to free verse and post-free verse poetry as a corrective against creeping grandiosity and bland "elevated" tone such as we too often see in contemporary academic poetry. It's fine to get all High and Mighty with your voice, but you also need to be able to Get Down. If a poet is not able to channel the no-frills, gut-level, ever-fresh American street-talk vernacular into his poems, he will regularly be cut off at the knees and exposed as a windbag by poets who write like this: if
it doesn't come bursting out of you (Charles Bukowski, "So You Want To Be A Writer?"). Bukowski
said that he wrote his poems basically in one shot. He would stay up
late with some classical music on and a 6-pack of beer and type poem
after poem till he was spent. He wouldn't worry too much about how good
or bad any particular poem was. He wrote a lot. He has been dead now
several years and new collections of his writing are still coming out.
He didn't revise much and this is reflected in the street-level simple
cunning instinctive Hemingwayesque style that he uses. He wrote short
stories and some autobiographical novels too, and he brought short story
techniques of plot, anecdote and characterization into his poems. He
doesn't depend on virtuoso musical effects or subtle evasions of meaning
like, say, Wallace Stevens, to make his poems. Instead Bukowski relied
heavily on telling a story, on having a punch line, on laying out a
gritty confessional scene. One could never imagine Stevens writing a
poem about taking a shit, but Buk did all the time. Such is the variance
in idiom from poet to poet. "What
I have noticed of most poets that write at mipo, and are, more or less, as we at the sandbox are, affected by each
other's writing, I think that most writers out there are more concerned with flexing words and their
apparent beauty rather than doing something solid This is from a young poet out somewhere in India, Ankush. He is referring to the difference in voicing one may detect, at times, as between the poets over at the venerable MiPo HeadQuarters board and those over at the estimable Trash Poetry Sandbox. Indeed, different styles of voice tend to develop at different internet poetry boards. This is one way the net is changing poetry. Young Ankush goes on to say: "PJ for example. She is a very good writer. And yet, sometimes when I read her at mipo and even sometimes now, I find that there is a lot of dependence on how the word sounds or how two or three or more words will come together that lends off a certain kind of extravagance like a lot of perfume in a small room - mostly, this bothers me." Here, he is referring to PJ Nights, MiPo's Senior Poetry Editor and also an internet poet who from time to time becomes Eivaz' muse. Ankush is identifying a difference in craft-approach which I think has some truth to it. The poets at other internet poetry boards that I have seen generally do seem to be a little too locked-into pre-internet print modalities of intonation, voicing, ear, style, surface, tone, than the real formal wildness the internet can allow. Internet poetry should be different than pre-internet poetry - but how? Nobody knows. The rules are still being invented. The internet space is still largely wild and free. There will be poetic voices on it, someday, as fresh and strange as the voices of Carlos Williams and George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff were as American poetry opened up in the 20th century as its own distinctive creature, different from Europe. On the internet the model of "American" poetry becomes bullshit - the boundaries, the topography here, is still to be defined. Notice how the poet I am quoting from at this point is living in India. This is his take on Eivaz: "John
Eivaz for instance has this really cool voice, y'know like this really 'modern american' voice
which I wld give me left ball to have cuz I think it is so fucking cool.
I mean check this bit out that jack offered as an example: Its
great. But still, there is a hint in most poems of what
writers hanging out at mipo or (Salty Dreams is another online board). Who knows? Is Eivaz right? Is Ankush right? How important is it to be right? What is "right" anyway - how do the mechanics of literary history and poetic greatness and reputation work? What is a "great" poem on the internet? How much does it even need to look like a "poem," like what we think a poem is? Remember that when Emily Dickinson was writing people thought her writing was too freaky to be thought of "poems." Is that what is happened here on the internet too? Think about the differences between books and internet sites. A book: you pay money for it, you expect to read it over and over. So the poem in the book needs to stand up to multiple readings. That affects the form of the poem, its texture. On the internet though, which is so fluid and ever-changing, does the poem-text have to be something we need over and over again? Could the poem maybe be more like the Bukowski model - quickly written, quickly read - a lot of them - maybe you never read it again? What would a poem look like, how would its form be different, if what we wanted was something fun on the first read but maybe never subjected to 50 or 100 reads? All of these are open questions. |
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