Are you overwhelmed? I know I am. Even with recent sparks of hope, there have been a hell of a lot of slings and arrows lately. We have not been fine. But when things get tough, we can turn to poetry. Of course, poetry’s as overwhelmed as we are, anxious company, as these three new books amply illustrate.
Alexandra Teague meets this moment with megaphones blaring in her fourth collection, OMINOUS MUSIC INTENSIFYING (Persea, paperback, $18) — the volume knob on most of these poems starts at seven and goes way past 11. They portray an oversaturated America where “the man in the size-twelve heels calling Girl, how do these look?/would never tell you walking in this country is free.” This multiscreen, surround-sound blitz is often thrilling — Teague seems to have an everlasting supply of ideas, and she is frighteningly clever. Her best lines are like stand-up tragedy.
Everywhere Teague looks she sees the rapid degradation of human civilization and the planet along with it. “Because something has to be to blame,” she recruits Yeats’s rough beast, that famous harbinger of doom, as her avatar in a series of poems that journey into the bowels of a fallen nation plagued by guns and “foreclosed windows. Meth.” The beast is, of course, an embodiment of the horrors humanity has wrought, “made of the past like a junk shop/with split-frame washboards/and dolls with crazed, crazy eyes.” Teague’s beast reminds me of They Might Be Giants’ “person man,” the one who was “hit on the head with a frying pan”: sad, sympathetic and a bit blank.
In Teague’s more personal poems, all that churning associative machinery sharpens her metaphors to startling points, as in the gorgeous “The Horse That Threw Me,” a visionary lyric, one of the finest I’ve read in years. Figures braid and cascade until horseback riding becomes synonymous with the will to live: “Didn’t you want to canter beyond yourself? Of course you/did.” It’s a glorious poem, and there are more. But be warned: Teague dramatizes a seriously overwhelming world by seriously overwhelming her readers. This book may induce authentic anxiety. But so does your phone, every time you pick it up.
The sensation of doomscrolling is inescapable in Daniel Borzutzky’s THE MURMURING GRIEF OF THE AMERICAS (Coffee House Press, paperback, $17.95). Borzutzky continues his ongoing descent into global hell, which is capitalism, which is, in Borzutzky’s rendering, turning us into robots that buy things, including lots and lots of guns. He’s not wrong.
Borzutzky was thrust into the mainstream of American poetry in 2016, when he was the dark horse winner of the National Book Award. Here’s how he describes the experience in the new poem “How I Wrote Certain of My Books”:
…a light bulb went off I must think of myself as being
a bad writer on purpose and then everything changed I wrote a bad
book on purpose and it was the best book I ever wrote and I won a big
prize and I was invited to give a reading at Harvard
What is that? Borzutzky obviously means to be funny — he is a satirist, after all — but he’s also baldly confessing that he put one over on the literary establishment. No matter what Borzutzky is talking about, I can’t quite tell how he is addressing me — are we friends? Is this poet a bot? Are we both bots? How am I supposed to feel about someone telling me his best book is bad and that bad books are tickets to Harvard? Is it really that easy? Is this book making fun of me?
But that uncertainty is the point, and I think it’s well made: Our heads are stuffed crazy with language we got from who knows where, it can be hard to tell where our thoughts end and the internet begins, and the world is upside down when it’s right side up — “alternative facts” are still on the loose! Borzutzky portrays a consciousness totally infected by the technological, political and economic developments that have led to a world where a felon is running for president and we each spend hours every day entering our personal information into Meta’s database so they can sell it. This book, too, ought to make you anxious.
August Kleinzahler has always fashioned the speaker of his poems as a winking flâneur. In A HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paperback, $17), this wanderer settles down and holds court like a record store clerk, opining copiously on musical artists from the Eurythmics to Ingram Marshall. It’s a performance of effortless cool, no matter whether Kleinzahler is talking about “rain peppering the windows like BB pellets” or John Coltrane “on his way back from Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack.”
Kleinzahler’s magic as a poet has always involved a sleight of hand by which low and popular culture take on the power, import and historicism of high culture, and sometimes of aphoristic wisdom that applies to everyday life: “It’s a simple formula, really: verse, verse, chorus/(and don’t take too long to get there).” In Kleinzahler’s poetry, culture — music, books, good food — is essential to survival; it is life, what one does with and in time. Except Kleinzahler doesn’t take anything that seriously — many of these poems end with that same wink.
There is lots of beautiful writing here. But any music nerd who wants his friends to stick around learns early to keep his lectures punchy and brief, and to keep quiet while the music is playing. That’s not a lesson Kleinzahler has learned. The bigger problem, though, goes beyond mansplaining.
The first poem, “Whitney Houston,” meditates on the music pumped into grocery stores, worming its way into the ears of the workday shoppers, “young mothers and matrons” and one male poet. It’s quite a misogynistic outing:
What sort of life have you led
that you find yourself, an adult male of late middle age,
about to weep among the avocados and citrus fruits
in a vast, overlit room next to a bosomy Cuban grandma
with her sparkly, extravagant eyeware?
This poor grandma is reduced to a series of stereotypes, like the other women in this poem, and the “seniors” who also shop early. The poem ends by violently imagining the effects of hearing Whitney’s iconic version of “I Will Always Love You”: “All the girls would be dropping there like it was sarin gas/pouring from the speakers up there hidden behind the lights.”
Why are these women mocked and then murdered? And there are other truly sour notes. A poem that I think must be meant to critique the racism Thelonious Monk encountered in midcentury Paris instead amplifies it by repeatedly referring to the jazz legend as “the large Black man.” Another poem writes off the composer, muse and musician Alma Mahler as “a troublesome slut.” Of all the ways to evoke the beauty and power of music, why these? Why should poetry be as toxic as the culture it describes? Is this the history of Western music Kleinzahler wants to pass on?
OK, boomer, clearly we have another reason to worry. Teague’s and Borzutzky’s poems may make us anxious, but they also remind us that, thanks to technology, we experience our individual tragedies and personal fears together, on the same platforms, nefarious though they may be; all of us have more in common than we’d like to admit. We don’t need our poets to minimize, categorize, stereotype and isolate — there are plenty of apps for that.
The post 3 Poets Who See Society Freaking Out, and Respond in Kind appeared first on New York Times.
