Unnecessary Burdens

by Annie Finch

Published in North American Review, 1997

Review of Scaffolding, by Jane Cooper(Tilbury House, 128 pages, $12.95 paper);The Wild Iris, By Louise Gluck (Ecco, 63 pages, $11.00 paper); Materialism, by Jorie Graham (Ecco, 146 pages, $22.00 hardback)

Here are three new books by ambitious and influential poets who suffer under burdens. It may be a poet's responsibility to suffer no more than is absolutely necessary, but deciding how much suffering is necessary is, alas, probably not up to the poet. The burdens in these books are common ones, important ones in our culture. If they sometimes seem self-imposed, they may be all the more tragic because of that unnecessariness. If the suffering sometimes seems willful, in the tradition of the Romantic poetic ideal or even the belated Romanticism of Confessionalism, these poets may be all the more generous in offering themselves as examples to us all in this post-Romantic age, so that we might all better understand our own willful suffering.

Louise Gluck's Pulitzer-prize winning collection of poems, The Wild Iris, focusses on the burden of religious pain. The book consists of an ongoing dialogue between a god and a human being, a dialogue that is rarely easy. Gluck lets the poems' titles indicate who is speaking, and the essential incompatibility between the two participants in the book's uncomfortable conversation is suggested, at the start, by the fact that god speaks only as various aspects of nature: "Red Poppy," "Violets," "Retreating Wind," while the speaker addresses god only through the medieval Christian forms of "Matins" and "Vespers." The speaker's modes of address, like the notions of a distant, removed and uncaring god that permeate this book, seem to impede direct or meaningful contact between the speaker and Gluck's essentially pantheistic nature-god who, while occasionally given artificially forced diction ("that which you call death/I remember"), more often speaks with spontaneous strangeness, as if nature's heart were talking.

Gluck's human speaker, who describes herself in her opening poem as "depressed, yes," suffers continually in her relationship with this apparently uncaring god, knowing that "it isn't human nature to love/only what returns love." Her difficulties with God can seem willful, if not masochistic, as when she tests god by planting a fig tree in an intemperate climate where it can't survive: "It was a test: if the tree lived,/it would mean you existed." She fears that god has "abandoned" her and even imagines that god has envied the closeness she felt with her brother and destroyed the relationship: "who else had reason to create/mistrust between a brother and sister but the one/who profited, to whom we turned in solitude?" Even her own love for god is a lie: "Forgive me if I say I love you: the powerful/ are always lied to since the weak are always/driven by panic."

God, for his part (I use the masculine pronoun consciously, since this god tends to be paternalistic and is occasionally addressed by the speaker as "father"), responds to his deceitful worshipper with contempt and superiority throughout most of the book, addressing her as "you idiot" and remarking, "now I pity you."

The question of why the speaker continues to wrestle with such an unsatisfactory deity arises often during this book. Suffering is germane to the tradition of religious poetry, of course; but where a poet like George Herbert, for instance, leavens his doubt and anguish with continual doses of celebration, affirmation, and sheer love, Gluck's poems tend to sulk disproportionately. They are a sad mirror of religious faith in our time.

By the end of the book, the relationship between the protagonists does begin to change; the human accepts, during one of the most concrete and least lyrical "Vespers" in the book, that "you're in the garden; you're where John is," while god, turned kind parent, sings her a rather condescending song in "Lullaby": "Time to rest now; you have had/enough excitement for the time being." The book resolves its conflicts hastily, though gracefully and with some beautiful writing, as god leaves the human free to do her own creating while she accepts, in her last appearance, that perhaps she is after all free "to flourish, having no hope of enduring."

The Wild Iris is at its strongest when it allows the mysterious strangeness of a cthonic nature god, more ancient and universal than even Christianity, to shape its words. In "The White Lily," the last poem in the book, god speaks compellingly as a lily bulb: "This one summer we have entered eternity./ I felt your two hands/bury me to release its splendor." The rare descriptions of joy also tend to come in powerful writing, moments of rhythmic exultation such as the phrase "in the raw wind of the new world" ("Violets.") While much of the style of The Wild Iris is characteristic of Gluck, spare and sparse and calling attention to its words visually in the tradition of Modernists such as H.D., one of the most beautiful poems, "The Red Poppy," is rhythmically completely different. The poem is written almost completely in blank verse disguised by line-breaks: "Feelings:/oh, I have those; they/govern me. I have/a lord in heaven/called the sun, and open/for him, showing him/the fire of my own heart, fire/like his presence./what could such glory be/if not a heart?' One wonders if further such metrical indulgences might allow Gluck to access more of a directly affirmative religous sentiment, which might present a welcome change from the insistent pain and frustration that unite and shape, but also tend to chip away energy from, the poems in The Wild Iris.

Though the wordy, dramatic musings of Jorie Graham's fifth book, Materialism, seem at first far removed in inspiration from Gluck's ascetic lyricism, Graham's work in this book is fueled by a similar self-limiting situation. Graham's chosen burden is not religious but philosophical: these poems are obsessed with the supposedly universal difficulty of perceiving and communicating about reality.

Materialism is dramatic poetry in more ways than one, since the book really consists of a conversation between Graham's poems and long passages reprinted from the works of various thinkers including Wittgenstein, Sir Francis Bacon, Plato, Brecht, and Walter Benjamin, as well as Whitman and Jonathan Edwards. These other voices interact with, and often conflict with, that of the speaker, making implicit connections that urge the reader to wrestle with the philosophical assumptions underlying Western culture. Many of the poems themselves are also self-conscious philosophical meditations; a whole sequence of them are interchangeably titled "Notes on the Reality of the Self," while others bear names like "Subjectivity" and "Relativity," and many poems include unadulterated philosophical language like "And why are there/essents rather/than nothing?/Why is there/anything at/all?"

The irony of the book is that the poems, despite their angst over the impossibility of communication, contain many fine moments of effective narrative and lyric writing that do just what they fret about being unable to do. In a typical sequence in "Young Maples in Wind," the speaker goes into a long digression addressed to the reader, asking "do you taste/salt now if/I say to you the air is salt," and proposing that "we,/together,/make a listening here . . .," before proceeding to a magnificent closing lyrical address to the maple leaves: "and you, green face-mournful, tormented, self-swallowing, graven,/navel-and-theory face, what is it you turn towards, green history-face,/what is your migration from?" Some might argue that, in workshop jargon, Graham "earns" her lyric ending through the self-conscious doubt and questioning about her rights and power as a writer that precedes it; it is, on the other hand, equally possible that the philosophy dilutes and distracts from the passages of concise and powerful poetry that this book contains.

Graham's lack of faith in language's ability to communicate jibes strangely with her overall style, an extended and ambitious version of the unstructured free verse of the 1980s "workshop" lyric. Graham's aims are, of course, much more ambitious than those of the typical lyric. She grapples not only with fundamental metaphysical questions, but with political and historical themes such as the Holocaust, abortion, and political persecution. The fragmentary, meandering, apparently transparent style allows her to approach and back away from these themes, to question and doubt her ability to write about them, and occasionally to pounce directly on them in moments of wonderful writing. But there is something paradoxical about the use of the workshop style-with its idiomatic diction and syntax, its lack of conspicuous rhythm or rhetoric, and its attendant illusion of "naturalness"-as a vehicle for meditations on the artificiality and difficulty of writing. We seem to be being asked to believe that the speaker's idiom itself is pure and untainted language, that somehow it is an honest, ingenuous, and direct representation of her thinking.

Of course it is not. It is not that Graham's meditations are not generous and valuable, for they are; it is impossible not to admire the speaker's openness to emotional experience and the untiring vigilance of her thoughts. But the apparent belief in some fundamental level of uncrafted language lends the poetry an insistent flatness of effect that might benefit (and does, in occasional narrative poems) from the distance provided by an authorial mask or persona. As it is, Graham's most interesting poems sometimes form Robert Browningesque dramatic monologues in spite of themselves, as the speaker's own theoretically hidden personality peeks out from behind the language's not-so-transparent-after-all surface. A poem called "Notes on the Reality of the Self" that includes phrases about acting from Constantin Stanlislavsky uses this fact to excellent effect; it is a charming poem that shows Graham's too-seldom-tapped gift for comedy.

It may be that for all her efforts to tackle the abstract language of Western metaphysics on its own terms, Jorie Graham's best writing is, after all, the poetry that addresses other issues than philosophy and allows itself to engage, as best it can, with the world and its manifest aspects. This book's stories and descriptions are what stick in the mind. There is the teenage boy waving a gun, "as if trying to sharpen himself for entry," "acid, /rare, in support of progress, /looking for what he's missed," "tentacular, spitting seed, him the stalk of/the day, scattering seed, planting it deep-" and the terrified subway passengers in the wake of the trauma: "wet branches? what was I wearing?/and then much later, like a dream, desolate, things being talked about." There are the staunch and sad little girls in the concentration camp. There is the tragicomic moment when the speaker is reading Anna Karenina and stumbles on the objectification of the heroine: "Vronski's eyes/ fall suddenly on her so that her being seen is/ born. I tried to see past her. But her black waist/blocked the whole view,/black hourglass the stillness would use to enter,/swirling, breathless/yet in itself nothing." There is the narrative of finding a monarch butterfly-almost a sentimental story, grounded in the tradition of nineteenth-century women's literature- that essentially comprises "Subjectivity." There is the lyric address to the maples quoted above, and other equally gorgeous closing passages, like the address to dust: "oh, but tell me, morning dust, dust of the green in things, on things, dust of water/whirling up off the matter, mist, hoarfrost, dust over the /fiddlehead . . ." Such beautiful and captivating writing is the kind of poetry that matters to many readers; to find it right now, Graham's readers have to push through much less "poetic" terrain. Obviously this is part of the point, but just how essential a part of the point may be open to question.

Jane Cooper's Scaffolding is arguably the most sobering of the three books reviewed here, because the burden under which this writer has suffered is not religious or philosphical but social and historical. It is not shared equally by all members of our culture, as might theoretically be argued of our religious and philosophical burdens, but is experienced disproportionately by the marginalized and disenfranchised among us. It is the burden of political oppression, in Cooper's case sexism.

Cooper's book, reprinted now for the first time in the United States but originally published in England in 1984, is a collection of poems written over nearly forty years. Cooper, who was born in 1924, began writing poetry seriously in her early twenties and then stopped for several years, suppressing all her earliest work. She recounts the story in a long prose piece at the center of Scaffolding, a writer's autobiography that describes her guilt and confusion over being that oddity, a "woman poet" (a "contradiction in terms," as one classmate informed her) in the 1950's. There are telling anecdotes here, one of the most memorable of which is captured by Coooper in a grim vignette:

a poem with capital letters

john berryman asked me to write a poem about roosters.

elizabeth bishop, he said, once wrote a poem about roosters.

do your poems use capital letters? he asked. like god?

i said. god no, he said, like princeton! i said,

god preserve me if i ever write a poem about princeton,

and i thought,

o john berryman, what has brought me into this company of poets

where the masculine thing to do is use capital letters
and even princeton struts like one of god's betters?

In the course of this autobiography, Cooper questions why her poetry changed when she started writing again at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the mid-1950s: "Why then, didn't I publish? And why, even more, did I give up writing poems, and when I went back to poems eventually change my style, after I'd worked so hard to make myself into a certain kind of poet?" These questions are suggestively but never satisfactorily answered in the essay, while the poems of Scaffolding remain as a primary document of one poet's development. The book is in seven sections, including a fascinating selection of "Reclaimed" poems from several decades that are some of the strongest in the book. The earliest poems, from the 1947-1951 collection "Mercator's World," are tightly structured, their violence controlled, turned inward-but just barely, so that they verge on grotesque. The style has something in common with that of Sylvia Plath, but Cooper's is a more fully rounded and strongly contained passion: "I feel my face being bitten by the tides/Of knowledge as sea-tides bite at a beach. . .It seems to me I may be capable,/Once I'm a skeleton, of love and wars." Cooper's "Eve" is defiant and somehow triumphant in her horrible passivity: "time has come/When she shall be delivered; some-/one must have, move her, or the doors/be shuttered over, the doorlids shut, her/eyes' lies shattered. In the spume/Of a triple wave she lives: sperm,/Man and life's mate break like flags upon her shore."

Some years later, at Iowa, Cooper kept a journal where she wrote, "I am trying to learn to lead a decent life and not want to be a great person." She also decided that her earlier poetry had been "too musical" and "too heroic." As she summed it up later, "my whole intention as a writer had changed. . . I set aside the kind of anger that often goes along with sexuality . . . for a while children, landscapes, old men predominated." There is also an attempt to penetrate some of the mysteries of the domestic world, but the poems of this period lack the peculiar sharp force, as well as the musical control, of the earlier pieces. Through the rest of the book, the reader watches Cooper rebuilding a style, balancing herself between her personal and political concerns. It is a heartening and disheartening sight, and the collection is invaluable for those seeking to make sense of the place of poets, and of poetry, in the current world.

Copyright©2006 Annie Finch