Book of the Month

May 2003

This book is one of the gems of Salt's recent and very varied output. It's Jennifer Moxley's third collection and her first in the UK (though a second, Imagination Verses – which I presume is a reprint of the author's 1996 publication from the US publisher Tender Buttons – is due shortly, also from Salt). Jennifer Moxley is one of the most unusual eruptions from the non-mainstream side of US poetry in the last decade. Founder of the excellent little-magazine The Impercipient in the early 1990s (the complete run of which can de downloaded as PDFs from the Duration Press website), then a poetics pamphlet series The Impercipient Lectures, she is now an Assistant Professor at the University of Maine, Orono, a bastion of American modernism and post-modernism, home of Paideuma, Sagetrieb and the excellent Man & Poet / Woman & Poet series of bio-critical volumes that have covered many of the big names of 20th Century Modernism.

Her poetic position, however, is an unusual one in that she is quite content to use old forms (but without parody), archaic language (without being patronising), and meaning (without deconstruction). This sounds like a mainstream poet, doesn't it? The thing is, she isn't one, even if she can write beautiful sonnets in pentameter such as these, which I like so much I'm going to quote them in full:

Against Aubade

Should morning's snubbed forsaken purpose come
in love's complacent orbit to relent
and to our bid for endless time succumb
could we believe ourselves the more content?
Invention may give credence to a thought
ridiculous, or better yet banal
should in a wishful prison it be caught
dissembling fear beneath the bacchanal;
Alone the mind can store old years anew
with furnishings our Eros will forsake
without concern, the watchman's cry rings true
my love, we should no longer lie awake
but stellar-like in darkness drift compelled
our matter's myth in time shall be dispelled.

 

Sport of Chance

In the half-death of my deepest slumber
your vanishing was my accomplished wish,
or so my waking thoughts in yellowish
dawn did make it seem, that I might number
infinite my imperfections, lumber
up my mind with the splinters of self-doubt,
undo the "thou shalt nots" and turn about
purported fate as in a wayward tumbler.
I could not bear to lose you in the dream
and yet I did, as if my will could trick
the plot that from delusion is lost erelong
and I escape the debt of love I dreamt
was lost, my provinces waylaid along
the path to cold, dark, indifferent rivers.

Cole Swensen, in the blurb for this book (evidently lifted from a favourable review of the US edition), says that "rather than problematize meaning, Moxley has things to say and actually says them", and notes the prominence of the first-person in the poet's work. What we really have here is a poet trying to engage with the inherited tradition and starting afresh from that basis; but that tradition is not one that was cut off at any particular point (as one often feels with 'mainstream' poets on both sides of the Atlantic), rather, it is a living tradition in which all the traditions, the modernisms and the avant-gardes are present, and to which the post-modern can lay claim with equal relish.

Some versions of current non-mainstream poetry adopt deliberately non-poetic discourses as a method of opening out the form and making it less stable; they avoid formal methods as unnecessary restrictions; they distrust the apparent certainty of the authorial voice and avoid the first person; they break down syntax into non-sequential strings as a means of releasing new meanings from overladen semantic units. I have no problem with any of this, although – inevitably – not all of the results are inspiring. It is peculiarly liberating to find a poet charging headlong into the possibilities of form with such relish, almost playing with them to see what will happen, using inversion, heightened diction, rhyme, metre, albeit not necessarily all at the same time. Now the obvious reaction to all of this is "So what?" Well, I see vast numbers of submissions to this magazine that try to engage with some of those disciplines; 99.999% fail miserably. I've seen published mainstream poets here and in the US try to engage with them and their hit-rate is a bit higher, but not much – the much-vaunted neo-formalists are really somewhat sloppy, or leaden-footed. Jennifer Moxley can do it; she uses the whole bag of tricks and ends up with the impossible: a fully-functioning post-modern poetry that raids the grab-bag of history but looks forward, not back. [There's an intriguing parallel in Austria, in the person of Franz-Josef Czernin, who has produced spectacularly thorny modern rhyming, metrical sonnets.] It may be apt to question to what extent these donned forms represent the trying-on of new masks, while the wearer cavorts before the mirror, delighted to have hidden the real self. My feeling is that this is not so, though I cannot speak for the earlier collection. I see here instead a controlled and knowing engagement with the full extent of the literary tradition, a spectacular display of "Look! I can do it..." and a glorious refusal to accept what everyone else thinks is the norm for current writing, mainstream, avant-garde, whatever. This writing is sui generis.

Now, my general enthusiasm notwithstanding, there are the occasional elements of bathos here that I find off-putting, though it could be an artful wearing of the bathetic as a disruptive device, as in

Eros tell me why, without love,
without hate, listening
to the softly falling rain
upon the rooftops of the city,
my heart has so much pain.

(from Section VI of the title poem)

But for all the occasional lapses of taste, which I think are part of the territory if you're going to live this dangerously, there are the little wonders that sneak up on you, unsuspecting:

Soft-coarse beard, my face abraded.
          We stood by the institutional
          door, to be gradually flooded
          by casual acquaintances. He said:
"it would be nice if you could survive"
          which I took to mean
          I still risk
          not finishing.

That afternoon I grew ill, eventually
          went feverish
          in an inert room. How I envied him.
          Freed from impatience
by ample time, no longer admonished by
          desire. But most of all
          I envied him
          those many husbanded years,
perplexed to rhyme
by her alien life. "I have
no wife," I spoke to the dust
and at last I drew
adjacent sleep.

(from Little Brick Walk)

Now, there's a tightrope walked with confidence.

She can also produce a splendid elegy, something we see too little of in this self-conscious age (in the 9-page poem Impervious to Starlight), and is quite prepared to lay herself potential hostage to fortune with lines such as the following, from Grain of the Cutaway Insight (a poem which includes a nod to George Oppen in its core, namechecking Of Being Numerous):

My thoughts are too awkward, too erratic to rest

          at ease in the beautiful iamb.

Wanting otherworldly

          metrics, or the faith

to overcome, …..

[….]

The poem therefore must be

                    a fit

          condolence, a momentary

and ordered form of the emphatic

                    question, around which continues to gather,

despite habitual despair,

          the moving

and needful Company of

                    thought, attentive

to existence, quiet and ever

                              perpetual.

… & thus does one set out one's stall, in the book's opening poem. A resounding declaration of intent, and a dare to the rest of the world to say that it should not be so. The book closes with The Just Real, which begins with this remarkable stanza:

Behind these words, might I find honesty,
or the hollow framework animate hung
with embodied longing that I have come,
notwithstanding the years, to claim is my
own, though it be a wedge, rare, abstracted
and sensuous, anchored in reflected
in-betweens of what I meant to do yet
failed to do, as well as everything that
I have done yet did not even wish for?

The structure of these lines, the artistry of the breaks, the outright flirtation with abstraction, the nod in the direction of the wonders of 16th and 17th century verse, all run together into a poem that, like the greater part of this book, is a rare and beauteous thing, but not quite what it appears to be on the surface. That surface is far more disruptive of poetic expectations that you might think, on first reading, as you go through full-tilt, headlong to the end, wondering at the sheer delirious cheek of it all. Go back and savour slowly, and the rewards are there for all to see.

The Book of the Month series was founded on the Shearsman website at the end of April 2003, with the aim of highlighting certain significant publications that the editor has found particularly exciting. Books of the Month have been selected for earlier months of the year, retrospectively, and one of the 12 chosen volumes will be Book of the Year in December 2003. Click on the months below for other Book of the Month selections in 2003.