Poetry Mag Girly Man Reviews

8/2/2019 Poetry Mag Girly Man Reviews

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EXCHANGE

Pure ProductsEditors' note: "P ure Products" is the first of a series of exchanges in which we arebringing poets of different aesthetics together to discuss new books. T he formatis as follows: each poet chooses a book he or she can w holeheartedly support andwrites an eight-hundred-w ord review of it; the exchanges follow the completedreviews, and the poet who has chosen the book under discussion gets the last word.

Girly M an, by Charles Bernstein.The University of Chicago Press. $24 .00 .ANGE MLINKO:The irony of Girly Man isn't the one depicted in the cover art: be-spectacled intellectual as King Kong, curvy Fay Wray in his hand. Theirony isn't in the backstory: Arnold Schwarzenegger's deprecation ofDemocrats, in 2004, as "girly men," which Bernstein embraces in achant dedicated to his son:

So be a girly man& sing this gurly songSissies & proudThat we w ould never lie our way to war.

N o, the irony is that Charles Bernstein, founding member of the lan-guage poets and author of at least thirty books, is one of the least girlypoets in English. He can bench press A.J. Ayer.

Cliches, idioms, ad slogans, municipal signs: they are for Bernstein,a lifelong Manhattanite, what landscape and weather are for the restof us. "I think language, along with outer space, is the last wilderness,the last frontier our collective inner space," he has written. Naturaltoo are vinyl tubing, mylar, electric blinker makers, test tubes, and


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A Hin du hiding in iglooA fat girl in blue blouse

From In ParticularRefracting his place and timejust before September ii and

through the Afghanistan and Iraq wars Cirly M an is, by any mea-sure, autobiographical work. But it is an account of relations medi-ated largely through social, not private, language. There are nurseryrhymes for his daughter, in-jokes for his colleagues, works commis-sioned by artists and composers. For each section ofthe book, andfor many individual poems, Bernstein includes endnotes detailingthe circumstances of its creation and dedication. Poems come fromsomewhere, he seems to be saying, and it's not a Rilkean angel or aSpicerian Martian.

Indeed , if an angel appears in Girly M an, or an anima, o r an animal,it merely highlights its own conventionality, as in a pastiche ofsong lyrics: "Don't you know I've missed you so/Wherever angelsgo/1 will take you there to glow." And in a lighthearted twist onthe "dead animal poem" investigating the semantics of shootinga horse "Language, Truth, and Logic" performs a little thought-experiment on the philosophical distinction between accident andfact, which determines the truth or falsity of a statement. Bernsteinimplicitly ridicules Ayer's assertion that moral judgments have nomeaning.

Youknow you acted w ronglyin stealing. Stealingmon ey is wro ng.

This, to Ayer, would have about as m uch tru th value as a unicorn, andit's funny to watch Bernstein simultaneously turn a philosophicalunicorn and a poetic dead horse into a hang on to you r hats yes,


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borrowed the phrase from the Saturday Night Live skit "PumpingUp with Hans & Franz" as well as in the prose dispatches fromSeptember ii called "Some of These Daze," and also in the tour deforce, "Slap Me Five, Cleo, Mark's History." This poem, commis-sioned by the University of Rochester Press, delivers an ekphrasison Bernard Duvivier's 1789 painting, Cleopatra. But perhaps that'stoo lofty a word for what Bernstein does here, for not only does heimpersonate the character Michael Anthony from the fifties televi-sion drama TTte Millionaire, he also makes him a descendant of theroyal corpse in the painting. A ludicrous lectu re/m on olo gu e follows,studded w ith factitious ane cdotes about Jo hn Beresford T ipto n (themillionaire in The Millionaire) and Marie A ntoine tte. "Slap M e Five,C l e o . . . " is a riposte to Cleopatra's upraised hand as she is seized bya Roman guard. A background figure seems to have "Excedrin head-ache # 4 9 ." Snippets of art historical and political com m entary breezereal questions past the bizarrerie, but it is all orchestrated into a per-formance designed to make our heads explode both in the EmilyDickinso n and the Loon ey Toons sense. Bernstein famously declared,"Th ere's more innovation and mo re cultural acumen in any episode ofRen an d Stimpy than in any of the book s of our last trio of (Am erican)poet laureates." The man wh o upp ed the ante tips his hand.

By all accounts, Bernstein the teacher and reader is a riveting per-former. Not for nothing did he title a book of essays Close Listening,against the prejudice for the page. It may be that Girly M an is a scorebest performed "in front of a live audien ce," as they used to say in sit-coms. And yet, the book is rewarding precisely in the ways in whichpoetry is not mere entertainment, but a sustained interrogation ofcultural values. Bernstein would be an ideal public intellectual if, inAmerican public discourse, poets were not indefinitely benched.

DAVID YEZZi:I wish I liked Girly M an as m uch as I like Ange M link o's crisp, sm artreview of it. Cracking jokes is a worthy goal in a poem, but they


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Thispo em , like allgood poem s, tellsa story in a directstyle that neverleaves the readerguessing.

Well, that's not anyone's idea of a poem, so chalk up an easy winfor Bernstein and his aesthetic. "This poem/has no intellectual/pretensions," he jibes, yet look what can result when one doesshrill self-satisfaction.

I'm impressed that Bernstein could write a poem on 9/n, whatwith so many zombie-like people streaming uptown. His prosy note-book-style entries are touching, butwhat Bernstein most wants totalk abou t is politics. Take "A Poem Is No t a Weapon," w hich readsin its bracketed entirety: " [ T H I S P O E M R E M O V E D FO R I N S P E C T I O NAND VERIFICATION.]" Having inspected the poem, I am unableto verify that it is one. That 's not because all kinds of things can'tbe poems, they just shouldn't be this banal. What, you're unhappywith the Iraq war? E ven W illiam F. Buckley is unh appy w ith the war.Bernstein should stick to being obscure. When he's not, he's sopainfully obvious.

If Bernstein's goal is to write, as M linko suggests, "a sustainedinterrogation of cultural values," then perhaps he has done it. A fterall, it's no great trick to ask the questions. But must all of his questionsbe so self-conscious? So many of his poem s, when they are not beingdownright silly, are choked off by the w eight of his "concerns."

ANGECharmed, I'm sure! But this reminds me a bit ofthe brouhaha overwhether Stephen Colbert was "funny" at the White House corre-


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it will crash the program." Bernstein, a humanist! (You didn't knowwe are supposed to be evolving away from humanism, did you?)

I w on 't try to recap Ron Silliman's (G oogle-able) close reading ofthe subtleties at work in "Thank You for Saying Thank You," whichis not an ironic poem; it is a conceptual poem about the deceptive-ness of face value. It too hinges on a consideration of context andposition: Who is speaking? How can you tell what's ironic, what'sauthentic? Given this, Yezzi fails the task the poem set for him. Bynot asking "How should I read this poem?" he reveals his position.That is to say, he doesn't believe the question "How to read?" hasmore than o ne answer.

The poems Yezzi points to are didactic, but others are beautiful:"Death Fugue (Echo)," "The Beauty of Useless Things: A KantianTale." Bernstein is a professor. I think it's wholly a pprop riate tha t hewear the m antle in his po etry (he does m ore than wear the m antle; hesimultaneously makes a shtick of it and means it). How much morerefreshing than those scads of poets who teach and so obviously, sodesperately, wish they didn't.

DAVID Y E Z Z I :Now I'm confused. Mlinko says that "Thank You for Saying ThankYou" is not ironic, then refers readers to Ron Silliman's blogpost, inwhich he explains that the poem is .. . um, ironic. "W hen does thereader 'know' that at some level this plainspoken text is ironic"?he asks. If Bernstein's name were written at the top, he continues,would the poem become ironic "even before getting into the text?"

If I answer "yes," does that position me further? And isn't"positioning," as Mlinko suggests, part of what the poem is up toseparating the postmodern sheep from the traditionalist goats?Silliman states that one of the "true," i.e. non-ironic, lines in thepoem is the opener: "This is a totally/ accessible poem." Does hav-ing to wade through 1,200 words of blog-gloss make it so? Do two


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it sacrifices aesthetic pleasure to cerebration. It's not the same asthinking in poems; it 's m ore like think ing o utside of poem s: no thingsbut in ideas."Death Fugue (Echo)" may be beautiful to many. I will not doubtit, though I will point out that the footnoted explication is longerthan the poem itself. Bernstein's cut-and-paste of two lines fromPaul Ce lan's masterpiece "Todesfuge" in this "resp ons e" to M arjoriePerlofF underscores the wanness of his concepts beside a work ofgenius.

ANGE MLINKO:I'm confused too I thou ght I was one of the "beauty pe op le." I alsoexalt masterpieces, tho ug h excessive vene ration leads to a house clut-tered w ith M etropolitan M useum gift shop tchotchkes.Nobody should experience anything they don't need to; if theydo n't need a poetry of ideas, bully for them . But even "aesthetic plea-

sure" has left a fossil record. Every aesthetic decision is a wager. It'sgenerally a poo r bet not to look forward.O r even sideways. I admit to w on derin g w hat Yezzi makes of thecity where he lives, the Manhattan that once spawned Modernismand now spawns Google and hedge funds, where law professorsand philosophers and actors and designers angle fiercely for jobsand apartments even though they won't live nearly as well as theycould elsewhere. Why? Because it is, as Rem Koolhaas called it, "aGalapagos Island of new techno logies." H ow is it then that we are atloggerheads over one of its pu re p rodu cts, Girly Manl

Field Knowledge, by M orri C reech.The Waywiser Press. $15.95.DAVID Y E Z Z I :Thomas Hardy tried "to write on the old themes in the old styles"


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linguistic sweetness wi th a bone-dry thematic melancholy. Frost saidit of Edwin A rlington Rob inson, but the same holds for C reech : he is

"conten t w ith the old-fashioned way to be new."Creech is the inaugural winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize, and

his work recalls Hecht's sonorous rhetoric and baroque mastery,while remaining soundly itself and w inningly up-to -date:

Amid such dense detailit 's easy to miss the m om ent w hen Atropos

bend s close w ith he r shearsto cut the tau t threads, un til their tension s failand time's grip turns loose;

easy, in Eden 's com merce of sunlight,wild fruit and stippled wings,

to miss the co rmorant bristling on the bough.So once a man lost sight,

near Pompeii, of history's beginnings,caught in some lavish now

of appetite the flush of sex, the steamrising from his bathw ater

in all that languor failing to note the windstir the trickled streams

along his flanks, the m ou ntain sound its thu nd er,or those first w arm snows descend . From World Enough

Th ose flakelike ashes conden se the p oem 's them e: that th e wages ofa careless sensualism is death. Creech's poems, like the above vanitas,regularly take on poetry's biggest theme of all: saints die, sensual-ists die, women are brutally murdered, skeletons in ossuaries aretricked out like the living, a black man in the So uth is shot in the face.Job's sons and daughters are stripped from him. As Creech warns in


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in Turin. Set two m on ths before Levi's suicide, the po em is a mo delof affecting understatement, its tone, imagery, and allusiveness allconspiring to foreshadow Levi's tragic end. Creech's careful layeringof literary reference (the title nods to a short but resonant chapterfrom Levi's Survival in Auschwitz) ups the poem 's emotional torque:

H is ow n canticle of painis, after all, finished. The past is no thin g new.An d the present breaks over him like the dreamof firelight, plush eiderdow n, and ho t stewa prisoner w ill sometimes startle fromw ho has lost hope of retuning to the wo rld,blow ing upo n his hands the plum ing steamof breath, in which a few snowflakes are whirled.O r, no dd ing above the passage wh ere Ulyssestells how the second jou rne y ended hurledb y a. fierce squa ll, till the sea closed over us.

At one particularly haun ting poin t in the poem , shades wh isper orperhaps beckon on the stairs (down which, though Creechdoesn't say it, Levi will later end his life). By awakening the circleof reference from Levi to Dante, Dante to Homer, and back toLevi Creech allows allusion to perform much of the heavy lifting inthe poem. In touching the past, Creech affirms poetry's "lavish now."

Creec h shares a num ber of H ech t's mo re sober concerns (the H olo -caust is on e) , but also, I'm delighted to say, H echt 's scabrous wit andstiletto humor. "His Coy Mistress" treats Andrew Marvell to a shel-lacking, much the way Hech t tweaks M atthew A rnold in "T he DoverBitch." Cree ch's canny lass responds to M arvell's seductions this way:


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in any case, my D ear. And since the sun'sno t likely to stand still, I'd be tter run .

That "time will find us out" nags at Creech (and powerfiiUy at thereader) even in his more slapstick moments: it's a way of beinghumorous without being frivolous, a vital and telling distinction.

It 's astonishing how m uch o fa punch "the old theme s," if they 'rehandled well, can still deliver and how accurately they continue todescribe our lives. In a sense, it's the riskiest gam bit of all: to find, asCreech has done, new utility in timew orn tools and make them shine.

ANGEAllusions, allusions: Yezzi leaves out Orpheus, Weil, Giotto,Leonardo, Newton, "A Guide to Rousseau," and a "Variation on aTheme of Keats." Not to mention "Little Primer of the EuropeanRomantic Tradition." Bernstein is not the only one teaching.

I'm no t sure wh at there is to gain from insisting that these poem sare "new" and "up-to-date." They're not, and they don't want to be.Why confuse their intended audience?

Is it true that "poetry's biggest theme of all" is wretchedness?Th at's just m oralism. It 's hard to argue with som eone's inborntemperament, but Creech treats our world as fallen a Christianconcept and evinces much disdain for the, shall we say, sublunarsphere. It reaches a pitch near the end o fth e book , in a run of poemsbeginning with "D iscourse on Desire" through "Slow Tim e." In theformer poe m , he gainsays a line from Trahern e "By the very rightof your senses you enjoy the w orld" with a graphic depiction of arape and mu rder ( representing "d esire"!). In "Variation on a Them eof Keats" he gainsays "Beauty is tru th " w ith "the clean, swept streetsof Theresienstadt." And in "Slow Time," after the story ofa blackman "shot p oint b lank in the face," I read again, "sun o n a feed store'swindows/so beautiful we know it isn't true." If "His Coy Mistress"isn't shrilly anti-sex, what is? Perhaps the lines Yezzi quotes from


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I think I will go mad if I have to read one more poem aboutPompeii. Intellectualizing suffering is bad enough , but moralizing ona natural disaster from cen turies ago is jus t a way to score "big sub ject"points while politely sidestepping the big doo-doo we're leaving allover the globe.

DAVID YEZZI:Let's sidestep big do o-d oo for a m om ent. (We can come back to it.)Mlinko rightly identifies the seriousness of Creech's subjects (surelydeath is poetry's big theme over wretchedness), but seems put offby his moral concerns. "H is C oy M istress" is in its satiric way suspi-cious of M arvell's brilliant, sexy com e-on , bu t anti-sex is too strong.Cre ech's response is a bit of w ry top sy-turv ydom . H e delights in let-ting the air out of Marvell's heated plea, while poking serious fun atou r baser impulses.

Even with a two-m illennia head start, there can 't be as many badPompeii poems as there are bad 9/11 poems. The only way to score"big subject" points is to write a poem that one wants to return toagain and again not only for its subject but also (and more impor-tantly) for the m emorable, indelible, and ultimately m ysterious webof sound and sense that constitute its expression. If Creech has notsucceeded in writing immortal poems, the roadsides, as Mlinko sug-gests, are littered w ith a ttem pts . I'd say he at least is on the inters tate.

Back to doo -do o: Is M linko suggesting that, by engaging with thepast, a poet is distracted from the crucial work of addressing the "d oo -doo w e're leaving all over the globe"? Apparently, the p oetry of ideashas become an idee fixe. Can't the past speak meaningfully to thepresent? Perhaps Auden was w rong to repudiate "S eptemb er i, 1939,"given its recent resonance. He was undoubtedly right, however, towonder if certain lines weren't dangerously sentimental. (Auden'smoral touchstone was particularly good at testing for twaddle.)

"The Shield of Achilles" speaks even more eloquently about man'sinhumanity to man, despite the classical references Mlinko might


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ing fully formed from it!). From moment to moment, I thrill to itsqualities without a clue as to where the poem is going, nor where itwill en d. A nd tha t is exactly wha t I feel is missing in Field Knowledge.Poetry should be an adventure. "Speaking eloquently" will get youa sinecure and a dedicated line to your very own espresso maker.

So it's mildly appalling that I've been driven to defend topicality!But that anonymous Pompeiian (Creech supplies not a shred of de-tail that wou ld suggest he is anything oth er th an a symbol) he boresme. I suspect that elegists on Pompeii have an ideological stake inrepresenting this particular scenario of helplessness, even thoughmuch human suffering has nothing to do with random acts of God.It 's worth interrogating which references from the past we plunderfor our ditties, isn't it? And really, which past'^ There are so many...But Creech's aesthetic choices speak louder than his references.His engagement with "the past" is specifically an engagementwith genteel, staunchly mid-century Anglo-American formalism.

I hear warm approval in Yezzi's review of Field Knowledge, andmaybe that's entirely appropriate for a book that starts and ends w ithwarm ly remem bered patriarchs. A m onolithic lineage, tradition, youname it it's all part of the package. But guys, it's 20 07 . The re's clearplastic shrinkwrap over these strange... I think they're wineskins!

DAVID Y E Z Z I :Fireworks: it must be peroratio time . Mlinko works so hard to estab-lish her progressive bona fides that p oem s get a bit lost again. But ho wcan the feelings produced by poetry h ope to com pare with the w arm -fuzziness of right-feeling (or feeling tha t one is right)?

It is 2 0 0 7 , to be sure, but th e same old shibboleths: distaste for th e"patriarchy," check; Anglophobia, check; lip-service paid to "humansuffering," check; equating the tradition w ith a "m ono lithic lineage,"check. And the whole Buffalo Poetics List nods assent. Or does it?Surely innovative poetry has more to offer than this boilerplate ofwarmed-over rallying points. The best poets are wily, not dogmatic:


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Mlinko devotes a lot of space to what is, I think, a misreading of"World Enough." The poem doesn't relegate the cause of human suf-fering to an act of Cod; it is, as I have said, a reminder that one'steem ing, sensual life can end w itho ut w arning . It follows in the trad i-tion (alack the word!) of George Herbert 's "Church Monuments":

"That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall." But that's just moral-izing, as Mlinko would say. And Herbert was English. And he diedin 1633 ... boring, boring. Creech clearly knows what Mlinko seemsimp atient to forget: how quickly one 's most tightly held assumptionscan pass away.


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