A poet is a figure sufficiently diminished to represent anyone. I refer to the figure in the words and phrases — here an appendage gashed by a comma, there a face fading down the well of a trope. “The act of speaking disperses the presence of a speaking subject,” wrote James Longenbach in The Resistance to Poetry. “No poem extends the illusion of an individual speaker without challenging that illusion; at the same time, no poem, no matter how strenuous its challenges, manages to avoid the illusion of being spoken.” Here’s an art that at once accommodates the maker’s urgency to speak and then routs their campaign to gain ground. There may be moments of detente. But a fragile truce often ensures the resumption of conflict.
Jesse Nathan’s debut poetry collection, Eggtooth, offers many delights, one of which is how its gestures remind me: this is what a poem is. He draws from memories of growing up in rural Kansas among Mennonites, but not to explicate a being situated somewhere before the poem’s language starts, for to do so, as Longenbach asserted, would “deny the temporal processes by which the self is constituted; it is to elide the problem, and the pleasure, of the poem’s spokenness.” Consider these opening lines from “A Country Funeral”:
The breeze quick-footed, skims the beards of wheat
trailing its hem over yellowing tassels
with a gliding so cruel for appearing so free
as it blows through a hog-tight bull-strong fascicle
of shelterbelt planted to revoke
its force and flow –
We’ve no polished phrases to recite, no …”
Nathan knows that the personification of the breeze is sufficiently pretty to call for a shift of register in the third line. The shift is instinctive. The air may move freely – but the reader must decelerate to reckon with the sounds of “a hog-tight bull-strong fascicle.” Nathan’s opening lines evince (or aspire to) a lightness of touch – to accommodate a growing intensity of concentration — as he attends to the details of scene and situation; one doesn’t encounter the presence of someone straining to matter. Such is the freedom of a breeze – but then, with epiphanies withheld, one feels the generous cruelty. I become — and perhaps so does the speaker — the poem’s gravedigger who “smokes in the gravel lot / by his backhoe on a mat / — hearing, but hearing his own thought.” We pivot between perceptions of a recognizable world and whiffs of what may simmer inside it. There is a hint, very slight but pervasive, that the mind isn’t adequately equipped to tangle with the mysteries of the real, but is drawn to them anyway.
The prevailing poetry algorithm calls for work that amplifies and allows direct expression of one’s convictions and conclusions, and frames the problems that cause anguish and precarity. Longenbach, who had little use for polemics as a critic or poet, countered by critiquing “the romance of conviction – the assumption that we are free to be single-minded … Single-mindedness depends on subordinating rather than coordinating conjunctions.” In Eggtooth, I listen to a presence who may want to be single-minded but must ultimately relinquish the urge; one can hear contentions rising through his memories and tales, only to darken within his diffidence. But still, there is enough grief here, however contained and queried, for the reader who requires it.
In Robert Hass’ introduction to the poems, he notes that Nathan sometimes employs a form devised by John Donne in his sonnets and songs. The result is “an echosystem of echoic effects.” In the fifth part of “What Ruth May Have Wondered,” a seven-stanza piece reflecting on a youthful romantic relationship (“A hand under my breast, he hoists me to his tongue / and tastes. Feels nice. But what’s not a matter of address?”), Nathan writes:
Stitching we did by trading stories. His house
jacked by lightning, say, for the one about my father
who caught me dancing (in pants!) and swore my blouse
fitter for the street. Or how that machine swallowed my brother.
But now I get a creeping wonder
that all we have in common is some other
oceanic longing. That we’re each other’s plunder
or plain alibi …
That “creeping wonder,” insinuating itself, triggers the turn in these poems, the mind also turning away from the very scene it took pains to portray. Everything happening between us may be ”a matter of address,” but to underscore that notion as a first principle, Nathan attends to every sound. He wants us to chew our food thoroughly before we swallow, in the tradition of meticulous makers such as Emily Dickinson and her offspring Heather McHugh and Lisa Russ Spaar. This excerpt also shows that Nathan isn’t hesitant to make a statement when the moment is right, though again, one must let the locutions linger. He is endorsing our spirits and minds by placing his trust in us to do our part.
A final Longenbach assertion: “The job of interpretation – what in fact we’re doing when we interpret – is to supply what the poem has appeared to omit, and our continuing interest in a poem turns on its resistance to our efforts.” How strange, one may say, that Nathan’s generosity is comprised in his withholdings. But this is because he wants to give us something to do and not simply something to agree or empathize with. He is able to engage us in remarkable longer poems that contain everything in his toolbox, as well as semi-fragmentary brief pieces that honor and depict thoughts or recollections that seem to await fate itself. Eggtooth, I was told, took 15 years to coalesce and poke through its shell – “a barb / to barb what’s chipped away / by the very thing maintained / and encased …” Savor it.
* * *
Everything I’ve quoted from Longenbach’s essays may be applied as well to Elisa Gonzalez’s work in Grand Tour. Like Eggtooth, it’s a first book that gathers up a past in order to proceed from it with no expectation of getting very far. But the presence in Grand Tour is more agitated, more invested in tone and attitude, more specific about relationships and their status, the view not dark as much as cautiously illuminated. The first-person is more assertive, its authority thus more pointedly queried. (She also excels at modulating pitch, the rise and ebb of emotional sound. Most poets lean on either tone or pitch, or tonelessness.) Still, she is careful not to allow the poems’ marked demeanor – or the torments that partially inspire it – to become the whole show.
The grand tour, a cultural journey through Europe, was part of an upper-class young man’s education in past centuries, a portal to adulthood. For Gonzalez, locales like Nicosia, Berlin, Krakow and Puerto Rico’s Cabo Rojo provide just enough distance from her origins to allow her to reckon with the troubled ease of accessing memory. For instance, in the second poem, “After My Brother’s Death, I Reflect on the Iliad,” she tells a barista that her brother had been shot at age 22, then relates how as children they ran through a museum. In a later stanza she writes:
Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames,
one black, one a gauzy red,
only to learn the title is Boats at Sea. It’s like how sometimes I forget
you’re gone.
But it’s not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes
carry us nowhere.
When in the last lines of “Epistemology of the Shower” she writes, “I learned you can separate pleasure from disgrace, though / it’s hard to make a habit of pure happiness, when there’s so much to know,” she specifies her challenge as a poet – how to handle this knowingness without excluding the reader from the process of reaching what looks like, but isn’t, a conclusion. If there are poles here, happiness or knowledge, then the grand tour occurs in the disquieting space between them. Similes will indeed appear in that space, but not to “carry us” beyond this transit back and forth.
This is why Gonzalez’s speculations often sound like passionate assertions, and there are many of them. They are enshadowed by memories of hurt – “My habitual sin, we already knew, was hating / my father, whose habitual sin was hitting me.” But she has arranged the poems so that we encounter the bruises in process. Even so, a thorough review of inventory is underway:
That suffering is often speechless, sometimes soundless, and yet we
understand it exists in the absence, too.
And yet have I ever not been shocked at pain? Like a toddler
falling down.
These lines from “Present Wonders” are leavened by the question about pain – the countering influence the wondering wields over the twinge of memory. Longenback wrote, “Especially when it has something urgent to say, a poem’s power inheres less in its conclusions than in its propensity to resist them, demonstrating their inadequacy while moving inevitably toward them. At the same time, however, a poetry content with limitation would be merely as alluring as a poetry content with grandeur.” Limitations are Gonzalez’s subject, not her means. And actually, her roving expansiveness introduces some grandeur as well. More from “Present Wonders”:
That I used to speak as a whole being without doubt. Or do I
misremember.
I tend to brighten the past, shadow the present – which is
shadowed, don’t mistake.
That I am angry though powerless, like a child.
Well then today I am a child,
And with a child’s voice deepened by some form of progress,
I ask for water.
The same cadence, the same intonation – insistent and afraid
because all lack in childhood feels forever: a fever thirst, a mother
leaving for her job at the grocery store, a door locked to keep you
safe.
Small fists against the cold door.
Gonzalez’s longer lines rarely sound blandly prosy – everything seems essential, most every phrase advances the reader in some fashion. She is on a mission, then she is dismissive. As for her own grand tour, it is never satisfied with a hop from what-I-was to what-I-am, even as those two psychic zones comprise an armature. It’s the moment of speaking that matters, and it will not settle into the stasis of a condition. The trendy genre-busting mash-up of memoir and poetry has occurred largely at the expense of the poetry – but not here. In her deflation of “similes” above, one hears a recurring note – not the futility of expression, but the distaste for its self-crediting artlessness. When she does make a statement about herself, such as “All I have is sleeplessness and rage,” one accepts it, but not definitively, since we hear so much more in the poems. My own youth is tweaked when she says “all lack in childhood feels forever” – and the poems remind me that there will never be a consensus between what I took to be myself and what I make of myself. What’s required is a referee’s management of the antagonists — such are her poems.
Longenbach insisted that poems of the highest order feature “a constantly shifting sense of alternatives,” and in Grand Tour and Eggtooth, it’s the shifting that matters. The poets’ restive intuitions and modes of expression, built into their characters, specify their own borders. Both poets offer assessments – but they are not satisfied with them, or not entirely. In Nathan, one discovers “the sensation, the sound, of words leaping just beyond our capacity to know them certainly.” And in Gonzalez, one may ultimately feel that “poetry’s greatest power is to instill in us a craving for something other than poetry.”
In memory of James Longenbach, 1959-2022
[Eggtooth by Jesse Nathan, published by Unbound Editions Press on September 5, 2023, 136 pages, $24.00 paperback]
[Grand Tour by Elisa Gonzalez, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on September 19, 2023, 91 pages, $26.00 hardcover]
Terrific; thanks, Ron!
Always great to read your thoughts, Ron!