Lowenstein, Jackson, Menos

Hilary Menos, Berg, (Seren, 2009). ISBN: 9781854115089. £7.99

WD Jackson, Boccaccio in Florence and Other Poems, (Shearsman, 2009). ISBN: 9781848610682. £9.95

Tom Lowenstein, Conversation with Murasaki, (Shearsman, 2009). ISBN: 9781848610378. £8.95

Hilary Menos’ voice in Berg is, from its very first poem, instantly familiar: wry, genial, self-conscious, mischievous without being too strange or threatening. In short, it is the voice of Billy Collins:

I want to write you a small square poem
that starts with space and a vague notion of form
then pitches in headlong—not holding its nose
at the pull of another body—to atmosphere...
(‘Gift’)

This small square poem, starting with space and a vague notion of
form, is Menos' attempt at catching one of the last living examples of that unfortunate species of ‘poems that describe themselves as they unfold’, most members of which have long since passed through Collins’ glue factory. Menos’ quarry, if it is not already extinct, has eluded her. It is not that the poem is bad, exactly; her lines are mostly very serviceable, although it is a little late in the day to be comparing poems to maps and soaring birds, as she does near the end. The poem simply does not demonstrate any compelling reason for existing.

Even the best poets can fall prey to the accusation of gimmickry; it is hard indeed for a poem to be more than a diversion when it relies on a trope which its reader happens to find markedly less novel than its writer must have. I would make little of it if Berg were not so full of similarly trivial pieces. Take, for instance, ‘Off My Trolley’:

Pushing my trolley today I have Ingomar the barbarian.
He is my shopping buddy. He strides through the fresh meat section
advising me on barbarian cuisine in the nineteenth century.
He is unimpressed by shrink-wrap and buy-one-get-one-free,
in fact the whole concept of payment is alien; shopping as raid.

The idea of a person or character from the past confronting an unfamiliar future is as tired as the idea of characters or artists as companions (later, the fictional Ingomar is replaced by Elvis, then Galway Kinnell) and the poem’s execution is pedestrian. Once again, I am left wondering why the poet bothered. Indeed, Berg can seem at times like an elephant’s graveyard for every trope that once was novel and quirky: the post-heroic lives of superheroes (‘Man of Steel’), sex with divine beings (‘Faithless’), the board game as metaphor for life (‘Cluedo’), the cartoon as the other of life (‘Road Runner’), the gulf between the idealised image of nature and its actual, messy vitality (‘Pastoral’). Like ‘Gift’, these poems do nothing unexpected.

Two others do worse, and are so unoriginal that their very unoriginality becomes outrageous. In ‘Tiramisu’, a reproduced ingredients list, Menos (perhaps unwittingly) apes Craig Dworkin’s conceptually far more interesting ‘Fact’ series, which lists the composition of the physical medium which each poem appears in; in ‘Clan’, she does nothing more than insert additional categories, of a similar but inferior nature, into sentences from Borges’ much-quoted taxonomic scheme of the animal kingdom. The ordering concepts seem almost to have been imposed – as if someone had given the poet a writing prompt which she could not turn down – rather than freely chosen as strategic constraints to open up a space for serious play.

The occasional pleasure of Menos’ clean, unpretentious verse is greater when I am not being constantly reminded that it is all in service of some neat trick. In poems such as ‘Gathering Dust’, ‘Men in Cars’, ‘Fall’, and the titular ‘Berg’, she allows the triggering idea to be just that, a starting point, rather than a target which the poem, Terminator-like, advances implacably towards. Even these stronger poems, however, are marred by her analogous penchant for the studiedly ‘bizarre’ image—quirky, yet utterly unsubtle and transparent. Thus icebergs are “like brides... queued to check-in at the Barrier... cold and hooded” (‘Berg’) and men masturbate in cars against a background of “a riot of foxgloves thrusting out of the mound” (‘Men in Cars). Still, these poems, whatever their flaws, possess something of that quality, missing in Menos’ more gimmicky work, which Yeats was referring to when he said that “a poem comes right with a click like a closing box” —although I do not always get the sense that they have something vital inside.

Unlike Berg’s often pointless games, W.D. Jackson’s Boccacio in Florence and Other Poems always has a clear sense of purpose: to complicate and expand our understanding of what it means to translate, quote, or otherwise appropriate. His is not a new discourse, as his own extensive annotations make clear, but it is a live one. Boccacio is framed as a standard collection yet consists mainly of translations, re-makes, and adaptations (to use Jackson’s terminology) of Boccacio, Rilke, Ernst Jandl, and some German Todtentanz verses. Each section, significantly, is titled as if it were an original composition (thus ‘Rainer Maria Rilke: A Post-Romantic Portrait’ and ‘after jandl’) and assigns a number to each constituent poem, as if they had always been intended as a sequence, which together creates an uncomfortable ambiguity as to how we are to read the book. Jackson is, in his way, every bit as experimental as the most avowedly avant conceptual poet.

Regrettably, Jackson’s grand ambitions are let down by their execution. Witness the stumbling opening lines of his attempt at Rilke’s famous ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’:

We never saw or heard the numinous head
Whose eyeballs blazed like apples ripely growing.
But still his torso’s somewhat softer glowing,
As of a branching street-lamp, holds instead

The brilliance of his look.

or the execrable closing lines of his ‘Leda’:

Into his love the god released soul’s sap—
And, only then at one with its white power,
Became pure swan in her loved lap.

Jackson’s stated goal with Rilke is, in an atypically orthodox formula for this collection, “to get as close to the original in each case as was compatible with the attempt to produce a genuine poem in English”. Having no German, I cannot judge how closely Jackson has approached the original; all I can say is that if these are good versions, Rilke was no good poet. Jackson turns Rilke into so much doggerel, as he does with much of his material. A case in point is practically every section of ‘The Dance of Death’:

Herald! your red official hat
No longer serves to distinguish you.
Nor does your mace, or drum’s rat-a-tat.
Shut up while I extinguish you!

*

Emperor and princes knew my worth:
My purse was heavy, stables stocked.
Many who heard my voice were shocked,
But death has filled my mouth with earth.
(xxvii, ‘The Herald’)

Ragged old blindman, no one can save
Your bacon. In your hour of need,
Allow me to cut your guide-dog’s lead
And show you to your grave.

*

I can’t earn my keep or my daily bread.
As blind as a lemon or log,
I can’t go a step without my dog.
Thank God I’ll soon be dead.
(xxxii, ‘The Blindman’)

It is worth noting, in passing, that although Jackson has declined to execute versions of the original verses on ‘the Jew, Pagan and Paganess’, ‘The Blindman’ apparently remains fair game. More important than this questionable judgment, aesthetically speaking, is Jackson’s tin ear for meter and rhyme, a deadly deficiency in a book which makes extensive use of both. For further evidence, take his description of a cuckold, waiting to spy on his wife and her lover, as feeling

Like a Greek waiting in the Trojan horse,
Or spare prick at a wedding. Or, of course,
A foetus huddling in its mother’s womb,
And lastly, like a corpse shut in a tomb
(‘The Chest’)

or his description of Oliver Cromwell’s fate:

They dragged him publicly through the streets
From Westminster Abbey, and hung
His carcass up like a common thief
(‘The Gift’)

In our scansionless age not every reader can be expected to see the problem with painful rhymes like save/grave, distinguish/extinguish and growing/glowing, or with unutterable lines like “And lastly, like a corpse shut in a tomb” and “His carcass up like a common thief”, but a poet ought to know better, especially a poet who makes formalism his business.

Jackson’s free verse translations (adaptations? versions?) of Jandl’s avant garde poetry, coming near the back of the book, are a welcome though insufficient relief, allowing his real talents to show in phrases like the starkly summative “my father had so much time. / i won’t be renewing / our acquaintance” (‘description of a life’) and in the wonderfully crass homophonic translation ‘surfacetranslation’, the latter being about as successful an exercise as these things get. For the most part, however, Jackson’s collection has an effect on me similar to that of the Ormulum or of SPORTS, Kenneth Goldsmith’s book-length transcription of a baseball broadcast: it presents an intriguing project, but offers little pay-off, intellectual or hedonic, in experiencing the object itself. Goldsmith put it best in a Jacket interview: “These books are impossible to read. I hate reading them myself. But they’re great to talk about!”

Tom Lowenstein’s Conversation with Murasaki is the opposite: a sensitive, resonant book that is not much to talk about. It is one thing to write with the vivid spareness commonly associated with classical Japanese and Chinese poetic forms (I am aware, as the poet is, that lumping them together in this way is an injustice, though sometimes necessary for convenience) and another to live up to what I can only describe as its deeper suggestiveness. Lowenstein has managed to do both, although—appropriately enough, for Lowenstein makes his poetry’s roots in Zen thought clear in his notes, if it was not sufficiently clear in his poems—it is difficult to say how. Consider these stanzas from ‘Hototogisu—Japanese Cuckoo’:

2.

What, underworld migrant, will
your message next year tell us?
The world’s darkness is sufficient.

6.

Scroll full of cuckoos.
Quick to accumulate.
Hard to sing with.

16.

With dragon’s blood still enlivening
his palate, the hero withdrew
from the cuckoo’s messuage.

I choose these stanzas as much for their infelicities as for their beauty. Stanza six I can find little fault with—it strikes just the needed balance between abruptness and ease—but at the risk of seeming presumptuous, I submit that stanza two would have been more pleasing had it begun with the more natural “Underworld migrant, what will”; despite, possibly, the performative function of Lowenstein’s halting, portentous syntax, fluency would have been preferable to enactment here. On the other hand, stanza sixteen’s “enlivening / his palate” is not performative enough, “enlivening” being far too abstract a word to capture its own sense, especially in connection with a potentially deadening commonplace like “dragon’s blood”. These are not trivial impediments in a poem so compressed, yet the stanzas did have their effect on me: “The world’s darkness is sufficient” (which I could not help but read as a counterpoint to Jarrell’s ‘90 North’, and which, like Jarrell’s poem, could so easily have fallen flat in its simplicity) makes my problem with the first line’s unwieldiness seem petty, and “messuage”, for all that it brings reading to a halt by sending most readers to the dictionary, is exactly the right word, implying not only habitation but one that is of uncertain compass (it may or may not include the area around a house, and the house may or may not already be built). My intent here is to show that, contrary to the usual characterisation of poetry which draws on Japanese or Chinese sources, Lowenstein’s is not primarily a miniature art, though he can be a skilled miniaturist. He gets important details right, and the rest, if not perfectly arranged, falls into place well enough.

Lowenstein’s debt to his cultural sources is not always as apparent as it is in ‘Hototogisu’. Stanzas like these:

O the mildness. Still thing. Earth’s courtesy
that’s transcended between hands. No angular
fragments with their inconclusive edges.
(‘The Poverty of Pots and Jars’)

Insignia I may not read.
What the bird sees it wants and needs.
Then feeds in deep grasses.
(‘Dry Mud Scratches’)

seem to borrow more from Ron Silliman’s New Sentence (syntactically, though not semantically) and from Stevens than they do Bashō or Issa. Here and elsewhere, Lowenstein proves quite capable of writing the matter of Zen—inasmuch as Zen has matter—without its contingent trappings.

Conversation contains any number of other solid poems one could quote as proof of its quality, and I do not wish to make the book’s range seem more limited than it is—‘No Pavilion in the Mountains’, for one, is more direct and discursive—but by and large the rest of its contents do not stray far from the styles and concerns of the two poems excerpted above. Of the three books under review, Lowenstein’s is perhaps the least ambitious, though only because it does not seem quite right to describe the aims of his project as ambitions. Lowenstein has not (it need hardly be said) remade the classical Chinese and Japanese aesthetic anew as Pound, for better or worse, did, nor integrated the practice of Zen with experimental traditions as radically as Philip Whalen began to in the ‘50s. He has, however, situated his work within it in a way that is enjoyable, challenging, and distinctively his own. That in itself is an achievement.