Contemporary poetry isn’t witty. That’s not to say it isn’t funny; on the contrary, it can be extremely amusing, sometimes even intentionally. But for the most part, the art form today vacillates between, on one hand, decrying social and/or personal injustices and, on the other, aiming at a kind of conspicuously literary self-portraiture. This leaves little breathing room for wit, which skates above both approaches like a water strider passing over a couple of submerged hippos.
Some might say the shortage of wit is a good thing. Wit, after all, is glancing and clever rather than weighty and moral; it’s potent, but at the same time, not entirely serious. Wit is what the mean rich girls deploy in the dining hall against a poor but spirited kid from the sticks, who will soon turn the tables and use her own wit to show these … anyway, it’s a quality you sometimes find in young adult fiction or romance novels. Surely it has at best a minor role to play in poetry?
Andrea Cohen’s new book is called “The Sorrow Apartments.” Like Cohen’s previous work it bounces around quite a lot, from cigarettes to Sansepolcro to ceramic fawns to lost wallets (her last book was called “Everything”). Cohen sticks to a conversational middle-voice that resolutely avoids “poetic” phrasing; “I spilled my Coke” is a typical remark. Her comfort zone is the one- to two-page lyric, examples of which constitute probably 90 percent of the work here. While she’s not a formalist in the strict sense, Cohen has an acute ear and an easy command of technical felicities. For example, in “Eavesdropping on Adam and Eve,” a kind of cockeyed tour of civilization by means of its founding couple, Eve “wraps herself, boa-/like, around him,” the line neatly mimicking Eve’s motion. It’s gratifyingly deft.
It’s more than that, too. Cohen’s signature maneuver is a kind of twist or flourish that shifts a poem away from the (usually sentimental) ending that seems to be coming. Here is the book’s last poem, “Bunker,” which offers a condensed version of the tactic:
What would I
think, coming
up after
my world
had evaporated?
I’d wish
I were water.
This reads smoothly and movingly, but the lines get pricklier the more you look at them. “What would I/think” is conditional; it offers the spectacle of an “I” imagining a future version of itself. But then the proposed future version imagines another version: “I’d wish/I were…” And this is all phrased as a question — but to or from whom?
Moreover, what exactly does that final “wish” mean? Is the idea that, assuming the lost world couldn’t be replaced, Cohen would try to recreate it with her own subjectivity? Which would then be eradicated (because it became water)? You don’t need to know Keats’s epitaph — “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” — to enjoy Cohen’s accomplishment here, but if you do, it adds another filter to the image. You keep looking at the poem while it glances at you sidelong, half turning away, half looking back, daring you to try again.
In other words, it’s witty. It’s also moving, because it puts in play real stakes: what it means to be a person, what it means to lose a world. The gamesmanship creates the emotional heft. This is because wit always engages with someone else, always reaches out to wound or encourage. (It’s easy to imagine a person being serious and self-regarding on his own, harder — though not impossible — to imagine him being witty in solitude.)
This spiky, enticing effect runs throughout “The Sorrow Apartments.” Is Cohen going to challenge us by drolly rhyming “courage” and “porridge”? Yes, but it will be in the service of suggesting that we (should?) believe utterly in our own fictions, including poems about porridge, regardless of their absurdity. Will the book’s title poem actually be about sorrow? Yes, but the conceit will be that Cohen finds herself in front of a real apartment building, though of course she has also placed herself there (“Who would name a place/that and why am I/standing in front of them?” — who indeed), and the self that she finds will be a series of reflections in a broken mirror.
There are limits to this approach, as there are to all strategies. Some Cohen poems are genuinely slight. Some are misjudged. The book would be stronger if 20 pages shorter. And while wit excels at reversals, it depends on the same hierarchies it toys with — it calls the status quo into question rather than angrily confronting it.
But this is the essence of romance. The game is established, the field is set, you can make certain moves, and you may lose. Still, you don’t have to lose forever; all games — including the very long game of poetry — remain resilient as long as we accept their terms. You can always play again, which is an opportunity, which is an invitation, which is a gift.
The post This Poet Flirts With Sentimentality, but Averts It With Wit appeared first on New York Times.