The Book of Men by Dorianne Laux

The Book of Men by Dorianne Laux, her fifth collection, is another offering from W.W. Norton. Though of the academy, part of the MFA machine, Laux is highly accessible, plainspoken, even hoi poloi.

The title of the book and the cover art, a collection of explicitly phallic fungi and plants growing out of a pair of men’s briefs, suggests that the thematic center of the book is masculinity, but that is not exactly the case. Only a dozen or so poems even involve men. I suspect that the cover and the title had more to do with Norton marketing than gender polemics.

The reader will find that this collection, like her earlier collection Smoke, is a mixture of confessional poems and poems, many of them odes, which deal with rock stars and celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Cher and Mick Jagger. This makes for good marketing too. American culture has little or no interest in poetry, but American culture is beyond obsessed with the cult of celebrity.  

The best poems, such poems as Juneau, Foster Child and Learning to Drive, all demonstrate Laux’s marvelous ability with metaphor and imagery.

Juneau

In Alaska I slept in a bed on stilts, one arm
pressed against the ice feathered window, 
the heat on high, sweat darkening the collar 
of my cotton thermals. I worked hard to buy that bed, 
walked towards it when the men in the booths 
were finished crushing hundred dollar bills
into my hand, pitchers of beer balanced on my shoulder 
set down like pots of gold. My shift ended at 5 a.m.: 
station tables wiped clean, salt and peppers 
replenished, ketchups married. I walked the dirt road 
in my stained apron and snow boots, wool scarf, 
second-hand gloves, steam rising 
off the backs of horses wading chest deep in fog. 
I walked home slow under Orion, his starry belt 
hung heavy beneath the cold carved moon.  
My room was still, quiet, squares of starlight 
set down like blank pages on the yellow quilt.  
I left the heat on because I could afford it, the house 
hot as a sauna, and shed my sweater, my skirt, 
toed off my boots, slung my damp socks 
over the oil heater’s coils. I don’t know now 
why I ever left. I slept like the dead 
while outside my window the sun rose 
low over the glacier, and the glacier did its best 
to hold on, though one morning I woke to hear it 
giving up, sloughing off a chunk of antediluvian ice 
that sounded like the door to heaven opening 
on a badly hung hinge. Those undefined days 
I stared into the blue scar where the ice 
had been, so clear and crystalline it hurt. I slept 
in my small room and all night—or what passed for night 
that far north - the geography of the world 
outside my window was breaking, changing shape. 
And I woke to it and looked at it and didn’t speak.

In rereading her poems, I wonder why I am not more enthusiastic about them. It occurs to me that I feel about these poems the same way I feel about the city of Chicago. There are the bridges of metaphor and simile that I admire and enjoy. There is imagery aplenty, a city’s worth of sights and sounds, but somehow, and perhaps this is not fair to say, it just isn’t Paris. Here we have the marshalling of workaday details, the gritty particulars of the working class (the collection is dedicated to Philip Levine) which build to wonderful image of the glacier sloughing off like the door to heaven opening/ on a badly hung hinge. Yet even this excellent poem never finds a destination. It just stops.

The polysyndeton of the last line shows that Laux wants the reader to slow down and consider it, but there is nothing to consider. The speaker stays the animal observer and not the human interpreter throughout. As a result, this poem reads as if it is not finished. Not that the poet should take the reader to some overtly sententious wisdom line—such is the fatal flaw of poets like Stephen Dunn and Mary Oliver—but it seems to me that we should arrive somewhere. There are many such go-nowhere-poems in this collection—poems like Emily Said, Lighter, and Late Nite TV— and they seem to enact an alienation—a sub-current sense of social anomie 

 Far and away, Laux’s  prevailing  poetic technique is the list, and this list technique can quickly become formulaic.  Ending a list poem, making it seem more than just an inventory, is another problem.  Here is how Laux seems to do it. She free associate any and all connotations of whatever it is she is describing and lists these things as cleverly as possible. Then, perhaps faced with the difficulty of ending such a list, she opt for the anachronistic and apostrophic OH or O --as if in the throes of a Keatsian swoon.

A Short History of the Apple

The crunch is the thing, a certain joy in crashing through

living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days.

                  —Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1929

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.

Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.

Eve’s knees ground in the dirt

of paradise. Newton watching

gravity happen. The history

of apples in each starry core,

every papery chamber’s bright

bitter seed. Woody stem

an infant tree. William Tell

and his lucky arrow. Orchards

of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.

Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.

Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.

Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.

The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.

Snow White with poison on her lips.

The buried blades of Halloween.

Budding and grafting. John Chapman

in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward

Expansion. Apple pie. American

as. Hard cider. Winter banana.

Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet

by hives of Britain’s honeybees:

white man’s flies. O eat. O eat.

Personally, I find the epigraph to be more compelling than the poem itself.  Here is another fairly typical list poem from Laux:

From  Gold

Color of J.C. Penney’s jewelry, trinket
in a Cracker Jack box, color of roadside
weeds, candy wrapper in a gutter. Color

of streamers tied to the handlebars
of a rusty bike, color of rust on the bike’s
dented fender. Color of food stamps
and welfare checks, dirt swept
into the long hole of the missing board
on the back porch, the untended sore,
phlegm in the hotel toilet bowl. Color

of mold in the broken refrigerator, light
bulb hung over the dog-shredded screen,

color of curtainless kitchen windows
throbbing through the dark, color
of underwear stains, old bandages, knees
of worn jeans, filters of generic cigarettes,
brand x bottles of beer, lighter flints,
match heads, dry leaves.

The poem continues listing all that glitters gold and, faced with how to end such a gilded enumeration, Laux lands on the homeless who are wheeled out at the last minute to lend the poem some gravitas. 

color of the edges of bargain basement
books dropped in the bin, dust rising in gold
motes onto the long tables in the public library
where the homeless come to sit in rows, heads
fallen on their folded arms like good school
children, taking a nap.

           There can be both joy and surprise in list poems. Such poems can even be a tonic from the semantically private and confessional poems in small doses, but offered overly much, some list poems can be a bit numbing and tiresome.

            All my cavils aside, I still think this collection to be well-worth the purchase price. Her poems seem effortless and I am glad that the cultural stars in our culture, such as it is, are a fit subject for a poet of Laux’s talent. Her use of metaphor and imagery alone make Laux a worthwhile read.

Richard Blanco: Looking for the Gulf Motel

Richard Blanco’s latest collection of poems, Looking for the Gulf Motel (Pitt Press 2012) returns to many of the same themes and subjects as his first collection City of One Hundred Fires which won the acclaimed Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize. I remember liking this earlier collection for its energetic and confessional exploration of cultural difference and assimilation. 

Looking for the Gulf Motel is a collection of personal and confessional poems. It is hard to hear the words confessional poetry without thinking of James Dickey’s infamous denunciations in the Paris Review interviews of 1974.  In discussing Robert Lowell, who was exempt from Dickey’s scorn (for reasons probably relating to gender,) Dickey claimed

He’s very good. But you can be interested in his hang-ups, his family, for just so long. In order to read Lowell and to like Lowell or Anne Sexton or any of the poets that follow after Lowell, what is presupposed is that their life and their situation is going to be eternally fascination to you. And it isn’t. The measure of his (Lowell’s) ability is that he can make you interested in his family; whereas Sylvia Plath, writing poems like “Daddy,” is ridiculously bad; it’s embarrassing. People like Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton just embarrass you.

Of course, Dickey was mostly wrong, as history proved.  Lowell continues not to make readers interested in his family. Plath and Sexton are now permanent parts of the literary canon, as poems like Daddy transcend the merely personal and relate to universal psychological issues. Meanwhile, Dickey’s claim to fame rests on a handful of quality poems and the movie Deliverance—remembered, if remembered, for dueling banjos and redneck homosexual rape.

Yet  Dickey was correct in asserting that the purely personal poem, the poem which has a coyly buried context, the poem which reads like a journal entry with line breaks, is not eternally fascinating. I found Blanco’s poems, with a few exceptions, to fall into this category.  From my point of view, and at the risk of sounding overly harsh, most of these poems were not interesting enough to be embarrassing.   

        Just why this is the case is worth considering.  I, for one, am not opposed to the confessional mode of writing. If the house of poetry has many windows, then I suspect it has more than few mirrors. Here are a few possible explanations for my lack of enthusiasm. To begin with the length of Blanco’s lines gets tedious because they invariably run between 8 and 12 syllables. This is the range of the spoken phrase, and can be as dull as someone who speaks to you without altering the length of phrase. Writing in fixed syllabics (decasyllabics, for example) would at least generate the necessity of unexpected variation. This volume also suffers from a fatal lack of interesting metaphors. (Here Blanco is very much unlike Sexton and Plath.) Granted there are a fair amount of similes, but similes limp where metaphors leap and the absence of that energy, after eighty pages, comes across.

       Many of the poems in this collection fall into the category of what I call the buried context poem. This is a personal poem that gives you a train-window glimpse of something that is no doubt loaded with important dimensions for the poet that are unknown and unknowable for the reader. Buried context poems generate a kind of iceberg feeling—the sense that there is a lot more to this but it is hidden from view. Consider

Maybe

            For Craig

Maybe it was the billboards promising
paradise, maybe those fifty-nine miles
with your hand in mine, maybe my sexy
roadster, the top down, maybe the wind
fingering your hair, sun on your thighs
and bare chest, maybe it was just the ride
over the sea split in two by the highway
to Key Largo, or the idea of Key Largo.
Maybe I was finally in the right place
at the right time with the right person.
Maybe there’d finally be a house, a dog
named Chu, a lawn to mow, neighbors,
dinner parties, and you forever obsessed
with crossword puzzles and Carl Young,
reading in the dark by the moonlight,
at my bedside every night. Maybe. Maybe
it was the clouds paused at the horizon,
the blinding fields of golden sawgrass,
the mangrove islands tangled, inseparable
as we might be. Maybe I should’ve said
something, promised you something,
asked you to stay a while, maybe.

Here the reader is either transfixed in an ecstasy of wanting to know more about this Craig and his sunny thighs or the reader has drifted into a coma of total disinterest.  I must add that Doris Day’s hit single Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps from her 1964 Latin for Lover’s album does all that this poem does but with pictures of Rock Hudson and a groovy Latin beat.   

      

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_fcG9GXeRw

As the above poem illustrates, a dominant feature of Blanco’s poetics is repetition—anaphora in particular. Such poems as, Looking for the Gulf Motel, The Name I Wanted, Habla Cuba Speaking:,Since Unfinished, and Place of Mind rely on repetition and refrain for structure This was the case in the poem Blanco read at Obama’s inaugural celebration  “One Today,” a crowd-pleasing cross between Walt Whitman and U2 lyrics. 

Some of the poems in this collection revolve around reveries and reflections which are utterly moot. This generates a feeling of puerility, an excess of subjectivity and self-reflection. The poem "Of Consequence, Inconsequently" is an idle reflection on the randomness of his genetic existence. He thinks of his great grandparents and asks

But what if they’d never met, what color

would my eyes be? Who would I be now

had they gone to Johannesburg instead,

or Maracaibo, or not left Sevilla at all?

Into what seas would I have cast thoughts,

what other cities would I’ve drowned in?

The countries I would’ve lost, or betrayed,

the languages I would speak or not speak,

the names that would’ve been my names –

I’d like to believe I’ve willed every detail

of my life, but I’m a consequence, a drop

of rain, a seed fallen by chance, here

in the middle of a story I don’t know,

having to finish it and call it my own.

So here the poet arrives at the notion of chance as a defining feature of his existence--which is an absolute given.. 

Most of all, there seems to be a certain poetic complacency in many of these poems—a lack of ambition—poems that read like dead end streets of nostalgia and sentimentality. Consider the title poem offered in its entirety

 Marco Island, Florida

There should be nothing here I don’t remember . . .

The Gulf Motel with mermaid lampposts
and ship’s wheel in the lobby should still be
rising out of the sand like a cake decoration.
My brother and I should still be pretending
we don’t know our parents, embarrassing us
as they roll the luggage cart past the front desk
loaded with our scruffy suitcases, two-dozen
loaves of Cuban bread, brown bags bulging
with enough mangos to last the entire week,
our espresso pot, the pressure cooker–and
a pork roast reeking garlic through the lobby.
All because we can’t afford to eat out, not even
on vacation, only two hours from our home
in Miami, but far enough away to be thrilled
by whiter sands on the west coast of Florida,
where I should still be for the first time watching
the sun set instead of rise over the ocean.

There should be nothing here I don’t remember . . .

My mother should still be in the kitchenette
of The Gulf Motel, her daisy sandals from Kmart
squeaking across the linoleum, still gorgeous
in her teal swimsuit and amber earrings
stirring a pot of arroz-con-pollo, adding sprinkles
of onion powder and dollops of tomato sauce.
My father should still be in a terrycloth jacket
smoking, clinking a glass of amber whiskey
in the sunset at the Gulf Motel, watching us
dive into the pool, two boys he’ll never see
grow into men who will be proud of him.

There should be nothing here I don’t remember . . .

My brother and I should still be playing Parcheesi,
my father should still be alive, slow dancing
with my mother on the sliding-glass balcony
of The Gulf Motel. No music, only the waves
keeping time, a song only their minds hear
ten-thousand nights back to their life in Cuba.
My mother’s face should still be resting against
his bare chest like the moon resting on the sea,
the stars should still be turning around them.

There should be nothing here I don’t remember . . .

My brother should still be thirteen, sneaking
rum in the bathroom, sculpting naked women
from sand. I should still be eight years old
dazzled by seashells and how many seconds
I hold my breath underwater–but I’m not.
I am thirty-eight, driving up Collier Boulevard,
looking for The Gulf Motel, for everything
that should still be, but isn’t. I want to blame
the condos, their shadows for ruining the beach
and my past, I want to chase the snowbirds away
with their tacky mansions and yachts, I want
to turn the golf courses back into mangroves,
I want to find The Gulf Motel exactly as it was
and pretend for a moment, nothing lost is lost.

       Here is the very soul of nostalgia, a wistful yearning for the past, beautifully and specifically detailed, featuring a simile or two and patterned by catchy refrain. But that’s it. I think that a poem should reach beyond abject sentimentality and nostalgia or should at least make the attempt. Perhaps another poem might better clarify what I am trying to convey.

Cooking with Mama in Maine

Two years since trading mangos

for these maples, the white dunes

of the beach for the White Mountains

etched in my living room window,

I ask my mother to teach me how

to make my favorite Cuban dish.

She arrives from Miami in May

with ah parka and plantains packed

in her suitcase, chorizos, vino seco,

but also onions, garlic, olive oil

as if we couldn’t pick these up

at Hannaford’s in Oxford County.

She brings with her all the spices

of my childhood, laurel, pimento,

dashes of memories she sprinkles

into a black pot of black beans

starting to simmer when I wake up

and meet her busy in the kitchen.

With my pad and pencil eager

to take notes, I ask her how many

teaspoons of cumin, of oregano,

cups of oil, vinegar, she’s adding,

but I can’t get a straight answer:

I don’t know, she says, I just know.

…

She insists I just watch her hands

stirring, folding, whisking me back

to the kitchen I grew up in, dinner

for six of us on the table, six sharp

every day of her life for thirty years

until she had no one left to cook for.

I don’t ask how she survived her exilio:

Ten years without her mother, twenty

as a widow. Did she grow to love snow

those years in New York before Miami,

and how will I survive winters here with

out her cooking? Will I ever learn?

But she answers every question when

She raises the spoon to my mouth saying

Taste it, mi’jo, there’s no recipe, just taste.

This is a classic immigrant set up—borderline cliche by now--often played out with the mother and hapless daughter-in-law. It’s the home cooking lesson. We have the easy Spanish phrases, the ubiquitous mangoes (I haven’t seen this many mangoes since the grease fire down at Hooters), dashes of memories sprinkled into the black pot. Who would object to such a heartfelt lovely poem and yet, at the risk of sounding callus, I sometimes feel that we are not too far away from Edgar Guest. Maybe it takes heap of mangoes to make a house a home?

            This collection is front-loaded with the best poems coming in the first section of the book. Such poems as The Name I Wanted, a kind of identity manifesto where the poet proclaims his preference for the Western Richard over the Latin Ricardo, The prose poem  Tia Margarita Johnson’s House in Hollywood, sets up the same contrasts with he speaker deciding to favor the Western house with its Sonny and Cher and Lawrence Welk--the house without a revolucion.  Such poems as these serve to lessen my overall sense of vague disappointment.