Six poets of 1999. - Review - book review

Literary Review, Wntr, 2000 by Burton Raffel

No sampling of new books of poetry, as currently published in the United States, could be perfectly representative, even if chosen for exactly those purposes. And these six books(*) are not anyone's choice, but simply an accumulation of the volumes sent by publishers, on their own initiative, to The Literary Review, and bundled up by that journal, en masse, for review. In the aggregate, however, those publishers are in fact entirely representative of the providers of printed volumes of verse, in late twentieth-century America. Two (or 33% of the six books) appear under major trade imprints; one (or 16%) comes from a well-established university press; and three (or 50%) are from smaller, regional presses in California, Colorado, and Tennessee. More: in the process of being carefully read (from cover to cover) the books themselves, like Topsy, have shaped a discussion of basic issues facing creators and providers of current American poetry. The questions are both general and fundamental: What seems to constitute desirable and readable poetry, to readers of our time? And who, if anyone, reads it, and why?

First, the "new and selected poems" of Lucia Perillo:

   there was something about his Sicilian features, his accent,
   his whole goddamned hard-luck story that just gnawed on
   me so ...

   We'd spend the rest of the day on food, eating spiedini,
   the anchovy sauce quenching my chronic thirst
   for salt ...

   the way my father might have spent his early mornings years
   ago,
   before he claimed the responsibilities of manhood ...

These are brief passages from a single poem, "The Northside at Seven," published in Perillo's first book, Dangerous Life (1989). Perillo was then thirty-one; like too much of the verse here reprinted, these lines are virtually indistinguishable from prose. There is clearly a mind at work, and also an interesting, even a challenging temperament. To put it differently, it is not the content of the "poem" which seems to me at issue, but why work like this should be labeled poetry.

   Like a Mobius strip: you go round once
   and you come out on the other side.
   There is no alpha, no omega,
   no beginning and no end.
   Only the ceaseless swell
   and fall of sun light on those rusted hills.

Bad in another and perhaps more familiar way, this passage from "The Revelation" is merely conventional, derivative, far more abstractly literary than meaningful. That is, bluntly, the poem is largely vapid, having nothing to say that has not been said already, and often said a good deal better. There is thus no content to speak of; the presentation becomes irrelevant--though there is a single brief moment of arresting language: "If you follow / any of the fallen far enough ..." But Perillo quickly allows this tiny taste of poetic power to dribble away: "...--the idolaters, the thieves and liars--/ you will find that beauty, a cataclysmic / beauty rising off the face of the burning landscape ..." The promise of poetry has slid down the slippery slope into empty gush.

Of the seven reprinted poems, just one is more or less satisfactory. Titled "Dangerous Life," it is nicely structured around two well-delineated and contrastive life-stages--unthinking, accepting Girl Scout and reflective adult woman. The poem works toward a deft and resonant conclusion:

   Some nights I take my lanyards from their shoebox, practice
   baying
   those old camp songs to the moon. And remember how they
   told us
   that a smart girl could find her way out of anywhere, alive.

But among the seventeen poems preserved from Perillo's second book, The Body Mutinies, published seven years later, once again there is only one ("Cairn for Future Travel") that strikes home. Here are the last ten of its twenty lines, which are also the last two of its four strophes: "And you, are you ready? Have you brushed / your brown suitcoat and hat? Have you counted / your mahogany chessmen and oiled the zipper / on their leather case? Have you filled / your sack of crumbs for the pigeons? / In the park, men are waiting, raking / the bocce court sand. And as for this secondfloor / window where I shake my fist: soon you will learn / to feign deafness, fishing the silver ball / up from your loose, deep pocket."

I do not want to claim too much for the poem, only that verse does not have to be immortal to be worth reading. Competent craftsmanship and solid content are sufficient. Still, the other sixteen poems from Perillo's second book suffer from exactly the same varieties of poetic ineptitude which affect the selections from her first book, namely, flat prosiness and derivative emptiness, in assorted combinations. (The following passages come from three separate poems.)

   Women who sleep on stones are like
   brick houses that squat alone in cornfields.
   They look weatherworn, solid, dusty,
   torn screens sloughing from the window frames....

   On those good days, a group from the charity ward
   named after the state's last concession to saints

   would trudge up the hill to the visitor center,
   where I'd show them California shorebirds ...

   We waded in the motel pool and clung
   to the edge of the deep end, because we couldn't swim.
   Maybe that's why we never went in the ocean, despite
   hours of driving ...