In 1949, at a
Berkeley symposium on poetry, the young Jack Spicer complained about the
smallness of the audience for poetry.
Poetry should be as entertaining as popular culture, he argued. “The truth is that pure poetry bores
everybody,” he said. “It is even a bore
to the poet.” Instead, according to Spicer, poets “must become singers, become
entertainers.” If poetry managed to be
more generally entertaining, Spicer thought, it would be less insular, it would
have many more readers.
The situation for
poetry hasn’t changed that much since 1949. Though in the US today there are
more outlets for poetry than in Spicer’s time and many vibrant nationwide
poetry communities and festivals, it’s probably a safe bet that most of the
audience for poetry consists of people who write or have written poems
themselves. In terms of the general US
populace, poetry has sunk into a mighty insignificance. (I’d be very happy to be wrong about this.)
One only needs to look at the NY Times’ list of 100 notable books of
2021 for evidence. (Two books of poetry made the list.) Or look for the poetry section in one’s
favorite bookstore or local library.
What’s there? (The Boston Globe, which lists 20 best poetry books
for 2021, appears to be one of the few media outlets that take contemporary
poetry seriously.)
If Spicer is right
and entertainment is an essential factor for increasing poetry’s readership and
significance, Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini is more than up to the
task. Her book is disturbingly
entertaining, in a rubbernecking at the accident sort of way. The book delights in picking apart illusions
of humanity’s goodness, dignity, and value, instead presenting us with a nightmarish,
absurdist poetry that is as bizarre as it is horrifying. In Bock’s inside-out,
upside-down, Lewis Carroll-ish scenarios, humans are the deadly
accident, the catastrophe. Art is the
first thing to go: the opening poem “Overcome,” with its biblical overtones, starts
the book off with a whacky sense of belatedness and loss. With art gone there is little left that
provides us with the inspiration for changing what got us to here. Museum galleries
have empty walls. People are entertained by the degrading antics of other human
beings. They piss in DuChamps missing
fountain, weep “for what might have been”:
And it came to pass, art became extinct. Still, we flocked to museums and stared into barren rooms. Look! Someone would exclaim. There’s a man rolling around on the floor, acting like an unbalanced washing machine, knocking into things and coughing up wet rags. Isn’t it horrifying? Oh, yes, excruciating, someone would yell out. People whizzed in Duchamp’s missing fountain. They blew each other like whistles where L’Origine du Monde used to hang. They wept under restroom signs for what might have been. People shredded their clothes, oozed from chandeliers. … And thus began the gnashing of hair and the pulling of teeth that lasted for the rest of the unknown world.
(My ellipsis, Bock’s italics)
The poems that follow, some with ghoulish titles such as “Snuff Poem,”
“Everything Coming Up Rifles,” “The Killing Show,” “Postcard from the Coffin”
pull us along with their inventive, unsettling strangeness. Monsters, mannequins, dolls, robots – the
almost human – populate many of the book’s poems, in competition with actual
humans. (The humans are losing.) The
book’s overall atmosphere is menacing and creepy, often involving the human
body’s dismemberment:
No, those are not starfish scattered on the sand.
Those are hands curling in on themselves, making
little nests on the beach. Sometimes, they scuttle
away to cut off other hands.
(“The Island of Zerrissenheit”)
Along the same lines, in another poem Bock cuts up body parts to chart
humanity’s eventual evolutionary demise:
Some time after the extinction of whales, babies were born in pieces. Lungs, feet, spleen all separate and in heaps. We dumped the remains of our babies in the woods, in the fields and into the seas. To our dismay, the single parts rose and animated. Heads without necks rolled around trying to connect with other parts. Hearts, arms, and tongues crept over the Earth in grotesque parades. Organs and limbs clumped together and survived for a time. …
(“How Rabbits Finally Took Over the World”)
At the same time, Glass Bikini is darkly humorous, provocatively
so. (Think Jonathan Swift, A Modest
Proposal.) The humor here is
double-edged. While Bock makes it clear
that humor may be one of the few psychic defenses left in times of existential
crisis, she also dilutes its power by reminding us of some laughter’s
underlying cruelty. In one of the poems that I see as central to her project,
she stages an evolutionary reversal, with humans trying to escape back to their
watery origins. The poem starts at a
party, where the speaker’s mother “curls into a set of ovaries and vein-blue
tubes.” The speaker picks up her mother
and carries her upstairs. What follows
is a laughter that is deeply disturbing:
…. I drop my mother, and everybody laughs. It’s just so funny. She slumps over and throbs in the corner. My brother slouches toward her. I try to grab him by the stumps, but they are slick from the forewaters. I keep dropping him in the rising muck. Everyone is convulsively laughing. We can’t stop. We slip, go under. It’s hilarious. All of us grabbing onto each other. All of us ill-made, laughing, and trying to get back inside.
(“Get Back”)
“Get Back”’s suggestion that humans are “ill-made” comes up in other
poems. In “Belief Is a Default
Setting,” newly-made human replicas “sense something ugly and festering in the
heart of a friend. Where there is none.”
In “Prometheus Report,” human characteristics are explained by mutations in the
genes: “Do you have the M-T-H-F-R mutation?
You know, the “Motherfucker” gene? You can’t detox with that one.” Such deterministic notions of genetic
composition, begging the question of whether human life is worth preserving,
place Bock’s work within a distinguished line of dystopian writing. Kurt
Vonnegut’s Galapagos immediately comes to mind. (In his book, humans end
up as seal-like animals, with no hands.)
A reader might understandably wonder if the book provides any relief
from the near-apocalyptic visions which dominate most of Glass Bikini’s
poems or if the book is a complete downer. I would say there is a
modicum of relief, if one looks carefully. I’ll point out two
possibilities. The first is the poem
“Invitation,” where Satan is unexpectedly the hero. On Monday through Saturday, Satan takes out
the garbage of the world. On Sunday, he
writes a short note to the “Dayside Creatures,” a note with lovely lyric
simplicity that stands out against the horrors in the surrounding poems:
I am a boy who lives in the woods.
I’ll leave the moon on
all night among the leaves.
The other poem I want to mention, “The Inside-Out,” is also lovely, though sadder and much more complicated. It could be read as a commentary on the book as a whole, in that it validates the imagination via a “dark specter” that “grows so heavy inside, it’s hard to carry around, hard to bear through the dream of the inside-out, where the wind whistles through the bones of birds choking on their own feathers….” It’s imagination, even a delusional or despairing one, that compels one to carry on with one’s life, “as if no one can see it beating you down.” The fact that such imaginative poems, however outrageous, actually exist in Glass Bikini – the book’s pages are obviously not blank, in contrast to the barren museum rooms of the book’s opening poem – gives us at least some short term hope that readers might be moved by Bock’s scathing critiques of our cultural moment. (See the poem “Pluto” for a catalogue of human miscreants.) Like the Emily Dickinson quote that Bock uses as an epigraph to one of her sections (“Tis so appalling – it exhilarates -“), this collection is unsettling, but by no means boring. It demonstrates that the comedic mixed with horror can be more scary and enthralling, more memorable, than pure solemnity.
—
Catherine Imbriglio is the author of two books of poetry, Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing), which received the Colorado Prize in Poetry. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in After Spicer (John Vincent, ed.), American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, Conjunctions, Contemporary Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, New American Writing, Pleiades,West Branch, and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry was anthologized in the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press). She is a senior editor in poetry for Tupelo Quarterly.
Rohan Chhetri
does not write poems for the faint of heart. Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a book divided into four parts, the first of which is titled Katabasis,
a word that translates to mean a downhill retreat or a descent into the
underworld. True to the word, Chethri opens with a monolithic poem that first evokes a bloody folk story before
leading into sharp lament for the poet’s own deceased relatives, a transition that weaves subtle
inferences of love into a framework of mortality. If the meaning
of Katabasis escaped the reader, this introductory poem ought to be a clear
forewarning. This physically slim volume of poetry is an emotionally demanding
work of art, as Chhetri turns an
unblinking eye towards the violent, death-filled nature of reality and questions
how it is possible to live in harmony with and to produce poetry alongside the darkness.
“The
King’s Feedery,” as the first poem, contains likewise the first lines of the
collection, lines that are jarringly
stark. “After the rape and the bloodbath,” writes Chhetri, setting the stage
for a panoply of poems about sincere
pain, but also signalling that the heart of the book extends beyond the actual rape and bloodbath. While Chhetri rarely shies away from graphic details, Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful seems more attuned
to the complexities of the “after.” This is a book concerned with the process of remembering desolation and telling
stories about agony.
In the first part
of the book, the Katabasis section,
Chhetri exposes the brutal nature of reality,
dwelling on stories of war and genocide and massacres. In “Lamentation
for a Failed Revolution,” Chhetri
parallels the corporal and psychological effects of violence with a poetic style of disjointed lines, vivid diction,
and spliced paragraphs. The images in this poem are horrific: he writes about a man with “blood sluicing down an
eye” as he walks to a pharmacy, about
a nurse patching together on a fifteen-year-old boy “a medieval coin-sized
chunk of skin fallen off the
areola,” about “paint-thick blood on the rained streets.” The poem is
exhaustive, spanning five pages and
nine stanzas; the story does not come quickly or easily to an end. How could it? There is a haunting character
to suffering that does not end when the event itself has culminated, something that Chhetri understands keenly. “They dragged our children’s fathers down to the river/ Held them by the hair,
pulled their tongues out of their mouths taut like catgut.” This is a historical trauma, one that will affect
not only the tortured fathers but the children
who observed and will inherit that trauma.
The poems take on a personal note in the second part, called Locus Amoenus in reference to a literary utopia, and seem to describe an intimate effort at reconciliation, as the poet shoulders the lasting legacy of generational trauma. In “Dissociative Love Poem,” he writes that “We are nothing but/ A sum of our history of shame. Grandfather rising/ from a ditch, blood-washed face bloated purple,/ Single pulse beating behind ear, left to bleed out/ By the man who married hisonly sister- / That’s as far as we talk about in the family.” This is the voice of a man struggling to live in a world where violence is so prevalent, even though it may not have happened to himself in particular. Even so, while Chhetri frequently writes about the violence-marred past of his grandparents and the unspoken griefs of his parents, he also alludes to a lover, who has presumably died, adding a deeply personal layer of sadness to the poems. Indeed, the third section of the book is named Erato, after the Greek muse of love poetry. In Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, the pain is universal and unique and at all times overwhelming. And yet the words are invariably ornate and powerful, while gruesome at times, sheltered in verses that are appropriately unstructured and free-form. This is one response to tragedy: to frame the tragedy in exquisite language, thereby creating a kind of locus amoenus out of the agony. Chhetri’s poetry, however, challenges this response. Is there truly any way to shape the language of ruin into something permanently beautiful, or is the beauty only found “in transit,” the rest blemished by the reality of death?
There are brief and brilliant moments when the poems reveal a glimpse of beauty. “Bordersong” begins quaintly, deceptively so. “We lived downwind of a bakery,/ butter sesame roasted black cumin.” But it becomes clear that the loveliness of the bakery image is short-lived, as the poem spirals into despair, ending with the line “Downwind blew kerosene & ragsmoke/ in some young martyr’s evening.” It is as if the trauma is inescapable, despite the best efforts of the poet to invoke gorgeousness. Nowhere else in the book is the struggle to move beyond grief more evident, until the third-to-last poem, a pentych entitled “Recrimination Fuge” that a forward-motion is suggested, as the poet manages to refine hope through the simple process of remembering grief.
“Recrimination Fugue” arrives in the fourth and final part of the book, Grief Deer, the name of which derives from the title of one poem and is echoed in the imagery of the closing piece: The ravens calling for the wolves to split/ Open the light from the dead deer’s belly/ Jeweled in the dark purse of its pelt. It is not until this moment in “Mezza Voce” that Chhetri finally admits to the discovery of beauty in spite of horror. “We are each given heaven for brief so heavy./ We put down dance small around it.”
In the confusion
of these final lines, there is of course a sense of still being lost and murmurs
of woundedness, of still being
hurt. But there is also, at the end of the arduous journey that is Lost, Hurt,
or in Transit Beautiful, something that truly can be called beautiful,
something beautiful that can perhaps be made permanent through poetry.
—
A native of
northern Michigan, Hannah Riffell is an upcoming graduate of Calvin
University, where she is a Writing major and a member of the Arts Collective.
Her poetry has been published in the on-campus creative journal Dialogue, as
well as The National Writers Series Journal and the 2018
book Beyond Stewardships: New Approaches to Creation Care. In
2021, she received the Academy of American Poets University and College Prize
at Calvin University. She intends to keep writing and reading poetry long after
graduation.
“So ashamed of our failed nation, we hide our faces behind masks,” writes Ken Chen in his elegy for a dying nation, “By the Oceans of Styx, We knelt and Wept” (Four Quartets, 91). What does it mean when a mask represents not so much a disguise, but a consensual acknowledgment of existential precarity manifesting in the form of the Nation-State subjugated by a viral pandemic? This is a core question that Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic, an extraordinary bardic chant and threnody for humanity, makes us ‘face.’ The choice to ‘face’ this question with masks on or off, the choice of kind of mask, and the choice of acknowledging that we have already, for some centuries, being living in a society of extreme masquerade is, of course, always ours.
As
the editors Kristina Marie Darling and Jeffrey Levine write in their foreword,
this has been a year when the iconography and rituals of an actual earlier cultural
artifact called ‘the Masquerade’ have returned with colossal force: “an
incoming tide of masks literally remakes
the faces of every country on earth” (Four
Quartets, ix, emphasis mine). Historically, the ‘Masquerade’ was an
eighteenth-century European entertainment that was also a tango with danger and
a memento mori, in part commercialized by the Entertainment Industry overlord
(a comparison to such a personality in our own times feels inevitable here)
John James Heidegger, who saw a ‘monetization’ opportunity (as always) in the human
penchant for crossing and re-crossing boundaries of purity and danger for the
sheer titillation and euphoria of transgressive risk-taking. ‘Masquerades’ became
popular nocturnal ‘raves’ in many
European cities, briefly but tantalizingly inverting social, sexual, class and
other hierarchies and dissolving the boundary between purity and taboo. Naturally,
what happened with the mask on had to be
left behind at the masquerade, a perfect recipe for a world turned upside down.
A
masquerade is a performance, and all performance intrinsically implies a
temporary death or at least suspended animation of the ‘person’ behind the
‘performer.’ Besides, masks are intrinsically unsettling because they are the
ultimate, uncomfortable reminder that we may never truly know who the person
next to us really is. They foreground the idea that any identity is a
performance, a kind of deceit or the potential for it. In the
eighteenth-century ‘Masquerade ball,’ ‘masking’ as pageant and entertainment entailed
not only a flagrant, exhibitionist performance of the instability of all
identities, but even a carnivalesque, theatricalized and often libidinous death
drive, a macabre one-night stand with death or dissolution. Excess and
transgressive frenzy were never far from a melancholic recognition of death as
an ‘underworld’ eternally undergirding life, of life as ashes and dust moving
toward ashes and dust. A mask is also a metaphor, and all metaphor is, of
course, an evocation of the absence of the thing being invoked. It is a
reminder of a potentially infinite abyss that could be hiding almost anything. The
early modern masquerade and today’s COVID-19 medical mask are both
representations of the open-ended implicit consensus that the coming plague
might be just around the corner, and so carpe
diem. Perhaps in this spirit, in their poem titled “During the Pandemic” Rick
Barot points out that “the canvas that was painted uniformly black could be
open-ended and be a consensus at the same time. Like a plague” (Four Quartets, 282).
Comparing
the eighteenth-century masquerade—a voluntary, often transgressive performance
of a transgressive desire for
transgressive desire—with today’s medically mandated COVID-19 mask may seem fatuous
or cruel. However, while a mask by any other name might always be a public
health contract, any mask is always a reminder of the rift between appearance
and reality as well as the hopelessly overdetermined site of simultaneous ‘open-ended’
‘consensus’ that the coming plague is indeed around the corner. The mask’s
promise might never be commensurate with its performance. So while COVID-19 masks are one performance of the
promise of good citizenship, of modern rationality, the masked look itself is
at the same time archaic and riddled with precarity masquerading as safety. Even
when the mask is epidemiological best practice, can it erase millennia of the
mythos of masking as charade and make-believe (even going back to Greek
choruses and Kabuki actors)? This begs the question of whether some Americans
have resisted wearing masks and even denied COVID-19 because they didn’t want
to be reminded of the essential hollowness of their beliefs and bets? If a carefully
orchestrated status quo—’Trump and Pence will Make America Great Again’—suddenly
begins sinking into an epistemological sinkhole called a real Pandemic
requiring real masks, if we can’t continue to believe that things are as they
seem and this is the best of all possible worlds as Voltaire’s Pangloss
insisted in Candide, what kind of
existential crisis does that land us in, and why should we allow that? Welcome
to COVID-deniers.
Poetry in the Pandemic riffs on the COVID-19 mask that so
exquisitely reinforces this existential doubt: the approach of the masked stranger
or friend signifies, paradoxically, both safety and danger, and friend or foe. In
the wake of an explosion of designs and styles in COVID-19 masks—including the
infamous and ‘humorous’ ‘death’s head’ mask, for instance—we saw ambivalent
staging of such caution always already infected with knowledge of precarity. A
death’s head, the quintessential memento mori, works precisely by chaining representation
inexorably to what’s represented, forcing sign back into symbol—the skull is death, not just its sign—but without
relinquishing the joke, the fun, of the viewer’s ambivalent reception of the
full enormity of the cruel joke. Most importantly, moreover, the precarity the
COVID-19 mask staged as well as intensified has proven unfairly and
exponentially more acute for underrepresented groups in the ‘best of all
possible worlds’ in 2020, a point we will soon return to. And it is this
plethora of meanings and messages, double-edged and relentless, that poetry in Four Quartets showcases. Poets in word
and image—revolutionaries incanting the ‘human condition’—rise in response to the
Pandemic’s terrifying reminder of the
chasm in the human experience of modernity and progress. The COVID-19 mask is a
memento mori particularly in a society where BIPOC Americans are murdered with
impunity and also fundamentally precariously situated—some masks are more
ill-fitting than others— when it comes to healthcare and all other life-saving
and life-giving resources, including the
(non-)empathy of a mad (non-)POTUS.
Almost
a century ago another bard of the human condition named T.S. Eliot wrote poems
collected into another collection named Four
Quartets. They covered many of the themes found in this present collection.
During the intervening century, the striving T. S. Eliot foresaw hasn’t brought
about the salvation and redemption he sought, unfortunately. So his successors
try again. Perhaps the editors have consciously collected here poems that
formally and thematically invoke the mask that has become the dread hallmark
sign of our Annus Mirabilis, CE 2020, or perhaps these poems have collected
together—since we, readers and writers cannot—as a cri-de-coeur of a collective
unconscious protesting an apocalypse we arrogantly fooled itself into thinking
no longer possible for our ‘advanced’ species. Nearly every poem in Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic is
an affective diptych
hinged on apparently divergent but clearly connected and in fact co-constituent
crises: the pandemic of environmentally
apocalyptic war against the planet, and the pandemic of socially apocalyptic war
against BIPOC, the poor, the chronically ill, the dispossessed, and the
disenfranchised.
One need only connect pandemics of greed and disease to see them fit together. In doing so, the poems both resurrect and challenge their apparent binary. The connections between environmental and social apocalypse are depicted, whether in disturbingly eloquent words or in the black and white photography of B. A. Van Sise in their collection The Infinite Present, a series of photos recording a Dante-esque infinity of hellish chronotopes, found also in Mary Jo Bang’s poem “The Present Now,” in which every sentence starts with “Today.” Both in Van Sise and in Bang, all those “Todays” add up to an indifferent, infernal eternity and infinity—no yesterdays or tomorrows—exactly the poetic conceit for Dante’s hell. For instance, in Sise’s photos, hell is where looming, lolling figures, damned souls, wait before closed liquor stores in gutted city neighborhoods, evoking by their frail hovering public spaces turned phantom and taken over by a sign saying “Before I Die,” or puppets eating cake at an empty “reserved” café table.
In
Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “Buffalo Prayer,” buffalo thunder through cities where
streets revert to original canyons, “wombs of cliffs” (Four Quartets 17), “with heat made hooves/ heat-hooves sure as flames/……/
more heat, more hoof, more breath/ more heart/ hoof music heats us back/……/ Buffalos/
All over the city/……./ armored military goon-squads in Bradley tanks/ roam the
night/ with orders to kill the four-hoofed creature/ but/ Buffalo are coming/ down
the Appalachia trail and Continental Divide/ grinding false patriots beneath
typhoon hooves” (Four Quartets 6-8). The alliterative thunder and pant of the verse
reminds anyone who’s traveled through the American West and Southwest exactly
what this buffalo stampede could look like and mean. Baca’s prayers include
that the time of the buffalo’s return will also be “The Time of Gardens” (Four Quartets 19), but with the Corona
virus as king, emperor (Four Quartets
17), “When the wealthy/ got on their jets and yachts and hid on their private
islands,/ gangster viruses hunted them down and took them out—/ I mean, how
radical is that, right?” (Four Quartets
20).
The
virus is indeed a gangster, but it also a part of an animistic sacred that imbues
landscape and poetry and finally stands up to viral greed and genocidal capital.
And like that animal/animus, the virus is also shape-shifting predator for
Rachel Eliza Griffiths’ narrator in “Fever” from her aptly named collection Flesh and Other Shelters: “I burn in the
frame of me, leaning against dark beams of bone/……/ I am in the teeth of my
temperature” (Four Quartets, 195).
When the king virus arrives, who then will be inside versus outside, masked versus
unmasked, self versus other, living versus dying, occupied versus alienated?
Greed and consumption would also do well to think of what they are greedily devouring.
The
enjambment of environmentally apocalyptic and socially apocalyptic pandemics is
centerstage in Denise Duhamel’s plainspoken
diagnosis of the unspeakable collusion of Late Capital and ancient prejudices to
destroy both planet and human community because with “George Floyd … the
protests began, the best minds of the next generation chanting, demanding sanity
from the worst King America who was clearly out of his mind” (Four Quartets, 262). Do, as E.M. Forster
said, “Only Connect.” Two pandemics, one crucible. A container for an evil can
itself be infected by that evil and thus in the end inseparable from it as an
image or idea; the black mask meant to contain the black plague will forever
after resurrect the memory of the black plague; effect seems amniotic in cause
because cause and effect are actually the same and also successive; so the
crowned king of Duhamel’s society bent on exterminating the ‘weak links’ (“the
terrible thump of Trump through the wall,” Four
Quartets, 261), can also be the virus with a kingly name produced by the very society fatally infected with
greed and hatred, at tireless war against nature and life in the name of ‘rational’
thought and ‘rational’ markets.
In
such a society, in the room “Where my sisters/ read the news of melting
ice-caps/ and the virus named after a crown” (J. Mae Barizo, “Sunday Women on
Malcolm X Boulevard,” Four Quartets 110) one is held down head first in learning “how
to love the cough, the test/ the social distance, the canceled prom, the empty
gym/ The steady slide into impoverishment,” as Jon Davis writes in “Ode to the
Coronavirus (Four Quartets 159). That
lesson might also hold the answer to Dora Malech’s question in “Dream
Recurring”: “This is History. Where are you supposed to be?” (Four Quartets 123).
In
Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito’s “Ghazal that Tries to Hold Still,”(Four Quartets 248) against its very
nature, the poem’s fourteener couplets end in the repetitive end-rhyme words ‘shelter’
or ‘shelters,’ giving the verse the hymnal yet balladic quality of the ancient
Arabic ‘ghazal’ that spilled worldwide—like a poetic pandemic—via Sufi mysticism,
uniting the positive affective
diptychs of spiritual ecstasy and wounded earthly love, equal hallmarks of the
form. In Brimhall and Saito’s “Ghazal,’ though, the tormented lonely cry of
‘shelter’-in-place demanded by COVID echoes the tormented crying in those other
‘shelters’ where ‘illegal aliens’ are herded by ICE before being returned to
familiar circles of familiar infernos. Their torments are not unlike those of the
‘patient’ in Maggie Queeney’s “Origin Stories of the Patient” whose “name, from
the Latin, from the French, is not rooted in pain but her ability to bear. To
endure” (Four Quartets 231).
The formal virtuosity of the poetry in Four Quartets also demands attention. A
tercet is a verse form characterized by words flowing like rolling waves. It can be hard to create a sense of
flow in three terse lines of tercet. And yet, when it is done brilliantly and
expertly, the form seems the most natural vehicle for emotion that is so
violently turbulent that it can only emerge in the tightly controlled and
sparse economy of the tercet or terza rima. Written intentionally as interactive, improvisational tercets (Four Quartets 24), Yusef Komunyaaka and Laren
McClung’s excerpt from Trading Riffs to
Slay Monsters parenthetically invokes the archetypal and foundational ‘call
and response’ poetics of African-American experience, ancestor of jazz and
hip-hop, and folds it firmly into the archaic
classicality of the tercet form. Their polyglot call and response style of
making song, making meaning, out of unspeakable horror, out of the tortures of
the master’s house, is the linguistic underground railroad for the febrile,
hybrid ‘visual’ that is the COVID mask: a polyglot, overdetermined, puffing,
laboring response to utter precarity and uncertainty. Can the unknown familiar, the unseen addressee, laboring at some other
plantation, hear me even there, and come to my rescue, even protect me? Komunyakaa
and McClung might be asking in their intentional choice of the call and
response form in responding to the grotesquerie of ‘a locked-down night sky’ (Four Quartets 36). Their choice of the tercet form reaches its
thematic and metric apogee as a vehicle for controlled violence in describing
those old ocean waves carrying enslaved humans packed like canned sardines to a
living death in a New World (Four Quartets
32 ff.). In that weave of verse they resurrect the desecrated souls of BIPOC, the ‘many thousands gone’ still mourning
the modern world birthed as blood and ejecta of colonialism and slavery, in “Look,
I am hurting to go back to 1544/ When the Portuguese struck the heart of Africa/
& prodded souls on schooners/ down in the midnight hold for weeks/ across
the Atlantic, to a New World,/ where oldest greed swallowed its own/ barbed
tail, & centuries later we are/ here to question & leech the past,/
speaking bluesy elegies to the future” (Four
Quartets 33).
This
discordant core of meter and verse mirrors masquerade as just the hobbled form
needed to ‘embody’ the history of slave trading, the middle passage, slavery,
and the world they have “now
built that is not the one man/ inherited. I mean, factory smog & filth/
yellow the horizon to reveal a broken skyline/ where birds reckon into the
wrong direction/ There’s not a prayer that can undo the scythes/ taking down
the forests, or the fires burning/ where bandicoots & kangaroos disappear
in billowing smoke” (Four Quartets, 32-33). Which has, thereafter, built the world—ours, COVID’s—where “bats fly/ into
a market & unleash nature’s wrath” (Four
Quartets 33). And the
following verses recall the
paradox of masquerade: “Don’t worry, love, there’s nothing/ in the world of
mirrors that is not you/ looking back. A sip of this or that reveals/
undying darkness we all keep hidden/ but hocus pocus can leave one bitter” (Four Quartets 34). These lines, where
the voice addresses a lover, also address or serenade a society (still loved) of
the masquerade—our own, after all—sequel to a society of the spectacle, that
has brought masking back as necessary mode and metaphor for world-splitting
crisis, the apt defining visual of a consumer capitalism built on habitual and
intrinsic deception, including the silly, designer, or even still-slipping
masks of COVID: declaration of intent to protect and potential to kill.
The motif
of call and response also appears in A. Van Jordan’s “How You Doin’?”: “Calling
and responding to this gesture/of seeing one another that, for once, won’t/ be
forgotten with the noise of the day/ So, when I think of my encounters with
others/ who are quarantined, sheltering in place/ social distancing to stay
alive, I ask them/ and —is it possible?
for the first time?/ I truly wanna know” (Four Quartets 212). Stephanie Strickland’s Jus Suum asks many of these same questions, raising a call to know
“whether they be freemen … for a single moment” (Four Quartets 45), to which “One Sentence to Save in a Cataclysm”
responds “Belief/ in/ the existence of other human/ beings as such is love” (Four
Quartets 54).
Mary Jo
Bang’s “The Present Now” is full too of anxiety for responsiveness, for
connections and contacts turning bloodless during COVID, all identities in that
poem having become proxies as in the letter ‘X,’ a placeholder for all actual
living, flesh and blood people. Only the cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio that the poet/speaker is translating retain heft,
flexibility, and animation in being not just ‘X,’ but ‘XIX’ or ‘XX’ or ‘XXXII’ or
especially ‘XXVII,’ a reminder that poetic
language and words—seen as stand-ins or symbols or representations for ‘the
thing itself,’ for the underlying Heideggerian physical world, or even as masquerades
for a supposed hard, immutable, ‘real’—maybe the only truth left in a world
where one seems to live inside an endless covering, coughing up “Keatsian
blood” (Four Quartets 61). This is a
world where enforced isolation and sensory deprivation generate language like
“I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to go out into the world without
risking death” (Four Quartets 62),
quite re-spinning Jean-Paul Sartre’s aporetic “Hell equals les autres” (62). This poet/speaker’s fallback dictum that ‘the
dead don’t suffer” itself takes on a whole new valence when the living are
buried inside COVID masks, the walls of one’s home, and the grief of seeing the
faces of one’s loved and known ones vanish, become ‘X’—‘X’ suffices because what
is identity behind a mask anyway?—is cousin to death or being in ‘Purgatorio.’ Bang’s
emphasis throughout “The Present Now” on Dante’s Purgatory XXVII—a known
disquisition on lust turning into care/love— casts new light on what COVID has
done to humanity in its advent as a new memento mori, reminding us of what
really matters: care/love above lust. In that canto, to describe that
transformation, Dante uses the metaphor of goats frisky at noon becoming pliant
and tired at sunset—goats famously being emblematic of unbridled lust suggesting
Trump is that goat, the ‘craven’ creature concerned with lust—for what’s needed
is the shepherd who offers care/love rather than lust, and instead “the country
is being run by someone so craven” (Four
Quartets 65).
Indeed, the days of COVID can be described as days
when “thoughts against thoughts in groans grind” (Four Quartets 66; from G. M. Hopkins’ “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”),
as also days when the pressure of feeling one hasn’t “gotten much work done
since, only what has to be done” (Four
Quartets 66) looms over empty/crammed hours in all their paradox
masquerading as coping. Yet, “What use to us are those meanings that don’t
reach each other?” as Lee Young-Ju writes in “Guest” (Four Quartets 182)? So Ken
Chen imagines refugee and migrant experience recently blazing across headlines
of America and the world, speckled with ash from the apocalyptic social pandemic
of hatred that necrotic political regimes have visited upon those bodies. Aptly
calling it the ‘underworld,’ the Hades of Greek mythology, Chen describes the
‘illegal’ ‘alien/a/nation’ phenomenon thus: “Each passing day, the waves of
Styx break new ground, spilling/ out/ national specters” (Four Quartets 92).
We
need masks in case they save us; we need poetry because it saves us. In the
face of the sheer enigma of the modern experience such as “We lived in giant
tin eagles we used rags/ Wrapped around human bones as torches…” (“When Our
Grandchildren Ask Us,” McCrea, FQ
85), we need poetry because COVID has proven that there are purgatories—pandemics
of disease, racism and hatred—from which only poetry will save us, as Dante, or
T.S. Eliot, whose own Four Quartets attempted
many of these enigmas more than half a century ago, knew.
Poetry in the Pandemic is about having the iconoclastic, hard-hitting conversations about class, race, age, access, and privilege that COVID-19 has summoned up in the public sphere. The various inequities that drive and design our world when it comes to safety and security for the planetary and the human have been shockingly and painfully exposed in the firestorm of this pandemic, and in this astounding, brave and brilliant collection of poems, raging dissent against systemic and brutal racism forces open the doors kept solidly shut against full disclosure of systemic and historical privilege. The mask is a perfect device to draw attention to a hidden problem; it is a symptom and representation of imminent disaster that exceeds its physical format as a covering on single, individual faces, a flagging of ever-possible and ever-present collective, aggregate catastrophe. A mask is, in other words, a sign that betokens its utter inadequacy as only a sign. This is also what COVID-19 is: a clue that something is deeply, terrifyingly wrong with what we have done to nature, scientific endeavor, internationalism, humanism and humanitarianism. Poetry is the truth that unmasks that mask, as the impassioned poets of our time show us in Four Quartets.
—
Nandini Bhattacharya is a Writer and Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her fields of expertise are South Asia Studies, Indian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies and Colonial Discourse Analysis, Women’s Studies, and Creative Writing. She has published three scholarly books on these subjects, the latest being Hindi Cinema: Repeating the Subject (Routledge 2012). Her first novel Love’s Gardenwas published in October 2020. Shorter work has been published or will be in Oyster River Pages, Sky Island Journal, the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories from the Great American Fiction Contest Anthology 2021, the Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology (Flowersong Press, 2021), Funny Pearls, The Bombay Review, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, The Bangalore Review, PANK,and more. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and been accepted for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and VONA. Her awards include first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), and Honorable Mention for the Saturday Evening Post Great American Stories Contest, 2021. She’s currently working on a scholarly monograph about how colonialism and capitalism continue to shape India’s cultural production, and a second novel titled Homeland Blues, about love, caste, colorism, and violent religious fundamentalism in India, and racism and xenophobia in post-Donald Trump America. She lives outside Houston. You can find her on Amazon, Twitter; Instagram, Facebook and her Blog.
When Gabino Iglesias approached me with the idea to write a poetry column for PANK, there was absolutely no doubt that I was on board. Immediately, I sorted through the pile of books I was reading, picked three and began writing. My aim here, and of the column as a whole, is not to provide traditional reviews, but rather short overviews that will hopefully engage future readers to poetry collections they might enjoy. I won’t guarantee that the collections chosen will always be recent (published within the past year or so), since poetry and certain books are, after all (and excuse the cliché here) timeless. Nevertheless, for this first installment, I chose three fairly recent collections that embody today’s social, political, and spiritual landscape. They have cemented their place in the literary world not only by being awarded the William Carlos Williams Award, or the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, or the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, but by being books that one can return to, as I often found myself doing when writing about them. Let’s hope you find as much enjoyment in these works as I know I did. Cheers!
feast gently by G.C. Waldrep (Tupelo Press)
In his sixth collection, G.C. Waldrep explores the tensions and harmonies between the body and spirit, presenting poems that are both beautiful and devastatingly urgent. Like his previous collections, Waldrep interweaves the universal with the personal, writing in a manner that is philosophical, spiritual, and conversational all at once. The seventh anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan provides a meditation on language and its shortcomings. A real-life funeral expands on the role chance plays in one’s death, and how God reveals secrets we are only briefly privy to. Other poems read like fables (“To the Embalmers” immediately comes to mind), and we are left witnessing the tragedies and daily miracles of the world feast gently so skillfully depicts. Waldrep’s poetry is at times demanding, but if given the right amount of care and attention, you’ll find that you are all the better, and wiser, for it.
American Radiance by Luisa Muradyan (University of Nebraska Press)
Winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Luisa Muradyan’s American Radiance reflects the complexities of the immigrant experience, and, through humor, pop culture allusions, and lyrical playfulness, highlights the exodus from one’s homeland and what it means to assimilate in America. Muradyan’s poems are not only concise, but funny, drawing on a plethora of figures (Prince, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Macho Man Randy Savage) that guide us through moments that are nostalgic, bittersweet, and at times utterly heartbreaking. Muradyan’s juxtapositions are clever and surprising, and with poems like “We Were Cosmonauts” (which narrates the speaker’s journey from Moscow to the U.S., while drawing comparisons to a game of Tetris), we see her poetic range, and see how moving a collection can be when it combines humor, history, folklore, and experiences so many can relate to.
Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner (BOA Editions, Ltd.)
In her fifth collection, Erika Meitner wrestles with the anxieties of modern-day suburbia. Holy Moly Carry Me is an outstanding and relevant collection that never shies away from exposing the tensions one faces in America, detailing, for example, what it means to be a mother raising a white son and black son in today’s political climate, or what it means to live in a region of the U.S. (Appalachia) not fully understood by others. Meitner has the ability to use seemingly unremarkable moments, such as a trip to the Dollar General, to examine relationships, identity, gun violence, teacher salaries, the middle class, poverty, and the responsibility to ponder these questions from a place of relative privilege. This collection is a testament that the mundane isn’t ever truly mundane, and that when it comes to our societal structures and the way in which they influence our behavior, there is always room to explore the truths that lie beneath the surface.
—
Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters,The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.
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