Frank Bidart's poetry: the substance of the invisible

Read collectively, Frank Bidart's poems show his art as wildly deliberative and deliberatively wild. The poems are choreographed to careen across the page. They often embrace sensational subjects and extreme emotions, but Bidart's intricate syntax allows for the expression of one of the most nuanced sensibilities since Henry James. Though the poems are essentially voice-driven, they are also plotted: their sometimes frenzied surfaces containing and propelling outer as well as inner dramas, dramas "of processes." The air of earnestness that marked his first book, Golden State, has not abated, and his distinctive homemade prosody--lineation, punctuation, capitalization, italics, all "deployed" as notational devices to reproduce as accurately as possible the voice inside his head, "so that the reader can see the pauses, emphases, urgencies and languors in the voice"--has not only given him enormous tonal range, but adds to the feeling that the poems are created out of compelling necessity, "the words welling up / by gravity rearranged." If sometimes his work seems to balance precariously on an earthquake's open fault line, its glimmer is not stage sweat. Especially in the most recent books, Desire and Music Like Dirt, the gleam of the poems, their hard spare finish, suggests a lava-like glaze, as if they were fired in the kiln of a volcano.

The air of being created out of compelling necessity is central to Bidart's work, charging his autobiographical pieces with urgency and his dramatic monologues with authenticity. In even the most baroquely framed pieces, such as "The First Hour of the Night" or "The Second Hour of the Night," one feels that the formidable art (and artifice) within the poems is at the service of revelation. The framing devices, the Scheherezade-like stories within stories and juxtaposed stories, the tonal shifts, aren't ornamental or diversionary; rather they give a sense of obsessive thoroughness, as if the poem is the outcome of an exhaustive investigation, and of transparency, as if the writer were coming to his insights as he wrote, with a sincerity of intention that, while never artless, seems without guile.

This sense of transparency and sincerity has to be constructed, of course. Just as creating the impression of a living voice in extremity or self-transformation is one of Bidart's foremost poetic achievements, it has been one of his chief preoccupations. Asked (in the 1983 interview included in In The Western Night) about Lowell's influence upon him as a young poet, he contrasted the use each made of the past: whereas the world in Life Studies "refuses knowledge of the causes beneath it, without chance for change or escape.... I was twenty-six, not forty--and my poems had to be about trying to figure out why the past was as it was ... (so I could change and escape). The prosody of my poems ... had to dramatize the moments when I felt I had learned the terrible wisdom of the past (so I could unlearn it)."

Though one might suspect that writing in itself is part of "trying to figure out why the past was as it was," Bidart does not say so here. Put at the heart of Bidart's poetics, the problem of how to dramatize moments of insight is presented as an aesthetic problem--the poems are records, not instruments of insight but the idea that the poem is in service of something other than itself increases the feeling of authenticity:

   The need for the past,

   is so much at the center of my life
   I write this poem to record my discovery of it,
   my reconciliation.

   "California Plush"

And, further, addressing his dead father, he decries the deceiving, reductive tendencies of the kind of formulaic poetry he is struggling not to make: "Oh, Shank, don't turn into the lies / of mere, neat poetry ..." ("Golden State"). Of course, the address itself, with its intimacy and immediacy, distinguishes the poem from the poetry the poet despises, and furthers the sense of honesty and earnestness he strives for.

Even in so apparently transparent a piece as the more recent "Borges and I," the "sweet fiction" of "an entire candour" is a tightrope walk, one Bidart maintains perhaps as agilely as Borges himself. In his "Borges and I," Borges bifurcates himself into a self who writes and one who does not, who has tried to escape the predatory writing self, but who (perhaps) writes this piece about his dilemma--which we are therefore to read (or are we?) as if it were an exception to what it posits all the rest of Borges' writing to be: sincere, rather than fabricated; true, rather than exaggerated. Unlike Borges, Bidart, addressing himself as "Frank" throughout, does not explicitly divide himself in two. Rather he is interested in asserting that, in his case, the writing self and the non-writing self are the same--and thus, really capable of "an entire candour"--and that in the act of writing "consciousness then, only then could know itself"--so that the candour is not only directed outward, toward the reader, but inward, toward the self. Calling "Frank's" belief an "illusion" and noting how "Frank," talking to himself, talks in cliches, Bidart implicitly and slyly distinguishes the writer from "Frank," while at the same time seeming to increase his candour and causing the reader to question whether the writer shares "Frank's" illusions or is exposing them as illusions. This is, I think, the only way in which Bidart's "Borges and I" sets out to toy with the reader. For even what is called "Frank's language of cliche" soon becomes very much Bidart's poetic style (repeated words, convoluted syntax to convey a minute but complex thought, an association from popular culture), and the illusions, genuine, even necessary. In their flux and flow, they allow the writer to write, until, having written, he needs to give them up, or at least see the last one, that the work completed "was what was," as an illusion, so that, dissatisfied, he can start the cycle over and write again, assisted by a new round of illusions.