Back in March, when the virus was so much younger, Dan Chiasson wrote a piece for The New Yorker about all that he and his students at Wellesley College, where he teaches English, would lose due to the cancellation of on-campus learning on the bucolic suburban campus, for some, most seriously, a safe space away from poverty and intolerance. The essay expresses a love for poetry and New England and, empathically, an appreciation for what a liberal arts college and education may do for people as they start out. All of of these notions also animate The Math Campers, his new collection of poetry, except the book also comes with sharp satire, great crass humor, middle-aged melancholy, and a far more decentered viewpoint.
Probably, one thing every poet has to decide is how much control to exert within their work, and this is related to how much improvisational space they allow themselves, and how seriously they should take themselves. Scholarly poets and other didacts can be particularly controlling and/or self-conscious in their work. Chiasson seems to be writing against this here, breaking into prose and poking fun at the pretensions of the poet as seer:
He viewed the Druidical majesty of the eclipse from the stone steps
of Memorial Church, and it was then, a source confirms, that he
knew all about New England.
Hmmm, what academic or journalistic source might that be, Dan Chiasson, or maybe some other cat reading a copy of Weird New England for the lowdown on Rhode Island druids. The poet as seer comes across as a bit of a goon at the unnamed liberal arts college in the book:
I’m forty-six, a trespasser
in my dream gym. The deer are children.
I’m the Maypole they dance around.
This makes me think of old photos of Mayday celebrations at the old Women’s College of North Carolina or Chatham College in Pittsburgh. There is something sublimely oafish about a 46-year old man imagining himself as a maypole, but then again to be an adult at any kind of student dance is to feel like such an enforcer, one of those teachers who walks around the dance in Grease and taps Rizzo or Danny on the shoulder. The next page of the poem reiterates and recasts the same scene in prose. “He wrote, ‘In my dream, I am in a bright auditorium. There are deer all around, looking for food. They are licking the linoleum floor and biting the wooden risers. I am standing completely still, terrified of startling them.'” The first-person comedy gets turned into a third-person account of a writer recording his sensitivity in a way that seems more constructed than the awkward comedy that comes before it. Chiasson is wise in the way that only poets who allow themselves irony and humor can be sympathetic, accurate and critical at once.
We also see that sections of the book may seem self-referential and reflective about writing, writers and problems of language (even borrowing the title Must We Mean What We Say from the philosopher Stanley Cavell). When we hear that a writer who sounds a lot like Chiasson in his previous books “had arrived at a trio of symbols,” those images then recur like bits of papier-mâché artifice, even though they are tangible and ordinary guides to our cultural landscape, phone G.P.S. apps, buoys, and drones. If you announce that you use symbols, your poem says, “Hi. I’m a poem.” Get it, math campers, camp, campy. But being transparently arty allows Chiasson to put feelings of confusion and being overwhelmed right at the surface. Here, Chiasson is destabilizing the authoritarian in himself, the boss of readers, as well as qualities that may have worked well for him as the ambitious student we get glimpses of at a Catholic high school, sweating good grades in foreign languages. In any case, these symbols or whatever they are do not over-determine anything here, and the poet may get himself wrong at any given point. I remember seeing a French movie about a writer years ago. A voice a few rows back, a hater of symbols croaked, “Enough with the goddamned eggs in this thing already.” It may have been my date.
I haven’t said much about the entertaining structure of The Math Campers. It’s something like a book-length poem made of four loosely constructed sequences and a postscript, but it also has something like a prologue and an epilogue, and there is also a verse comedy, a masque. Parts of the book comprise prose poetry, and others contain distinct lyric sections that could stand alone as poems, though it is not always entirely possible to see where one poem ends and other begins, and that is fine. I actually hope Chiasson’s next book is a bunch of singles, each one a new start, just to see what what his poems would be like stripped of connective, cosmopolitan intelligence. Lineated, he really flies. He can go metaphysical in this section about the seedy appeal of Québec to Vermont teenagers loaded with things that go around in circles, from Thibault the race-car driver to a pole dancer, to wounding time itself, then shift to a Williams-like eye for flowers, and then go comic book vulgar and back again:
Whatever Thibault was Thibault is:
like a comet he appears
blazing his stock car through the night sky:
he circles us, a tetherball caught in orbit
while around and around the pole
a dancer remembers her appendectomy
as she lap-dances on a happy bachelor
there by the grace of Fidelity and cocaine.
You see how even change is changed;
a Skylark, stylish and reliable;
you want something to lean on, lean on
remembered swallow, remembered meadow:
our sources say there’s no such place —
rest on the nonexistence
time force-feed the agastache, alyssum,
when up their little heads they raise
and look around like a periscope, and droop.
Our sources say they leave no trace.
Thunder Road echoes with roars
from the quarry owner’s son’s RX-7’s’
they drown out the sound of boners going Boing
in the Théâtre Superérotique in Québec
where the dancer spritzes herself and laughs:
another night, another dent in the appendectomy.
So change is changed, the most powerful force
is powerless, it goes on and on;
logic will not protect you, you have to have
stock cars, a rash, false indigo, a rumor.
By the way: I know you know about me.
And by me, I mean me, the author, Dan:
I know you know what I did, you spread it:
I mean the innermost you and me —
the ones inside our brains. I’ll have my revenge
in the form of blossoming amosonia,
amnesiac Orions with their belts undone,
a hit list, a who’s who, a spritz, a marquis.
All the elements of this poem go centrifugal and suspend in midair – while noting the agastache and alyssum, since the gardener is here as well. Although the book thinks about Lowell and James Merrill as actual characters and as in some ways forerunners of this panache, the absurdist and friendly voice is all Chiasson. Intimate space, any communion, is also profoundly anti-social as shown in the seemingly transparent poet with his hit list, whatever that is, and also in how the two parents become movingly ravenous during math camp. This poem gets a lot of social stuff right. The grown man watching the stripper gives his money to “Fidelity,” which may speak to how the economic system and systems of supposedly realistic representation can exploit disempowered people. Moreover, “Fidelity” is stupefied, the customer and the dancer both jaded.
This is a beautiful book to appear in a September that has so many of us wondering about what education actually is about on its most basic level. Is it to make active readers, critical thinkers who can think and speak with good judgment informed by feelings, or is to reproduce math campers who sing in unison and actually hope that they will never get old and lose the privilege of their youth by solving problems the right way? In one poem, Chiasson addresses the reader like a cop: “if the reader will not step away from the page / if the reader will now step away from the screen.” In another poem nearby, Chiasson becomes a priest who asks us to open up our hands with him to the enormity. This cop/priest figure or voice, not a villain but a goon, also wants to keep his eyes on our hands as if we were thieves, and both of these modes are spoofs.
Let me say this about the math campers. They are not cute. Neither, for that matter, are the poets here. Here is how Chiasson remembers one complicated charmer: “His body was a stick insect, but his smile flashed the news of immortality.” Later, becoming a poet is like becoming Bishop’s man-moth, with an identity like a frail armor: “my awareness stretching far beyond / my wingspan and erratic decision-making pattern.”
Today, most thinking parents worry about being bad parents and screwing up their kids in part — and that includes not messing up their sense of who they are in terms of pronouns and sexual identities — because of an intense identification with them, maybe because in the world of the imagination, most people carry their various ages inside them simultaneously. “Here, side by side, were sixteen and four,” Chiasson remarks. Forty and four as well, he might add, except we die. And here is a touching evocation, a sort of brief and broken pantoum of contemporary father-son time, with the desire to feel special, individuated, a sort of wedge against both male cultural and physical (but not “essentialist”) dumbness, the grounds of a conversation of sorts:
But our bodies were speechless, in unison.
We sat in the International House of Speechlessness.
Our bodies cried to each other speechlessly,
As time stole one after another minute together.
Our bodies cried to each other speechlessly,
As more time carried little bits of us away.
Then we laughed the family laugh, to find
Ourselves the specials on the menu we pursued.
So the consumer economy isn’t really helping, except for the pancakes, and will they even last? Like other poets who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, Chiasson in his poetry feels haunted by time-bound pop or alternatives, with Fleetwood Mac and eight-track tapes, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan’s self-inventions, things loved not just because they are good but, with the help of a poem, are also useful towards becoming. For instance, here “Over and Over” from the Fleetwood Mac album Tusk becomes excruciatingly evocative of the repetitions of life and the ultimate end of repetitions, especially the ones that seek to colonize the musical tastes of some pups. The word Tusk itself feels suddenly sharp, sad, painful, and part of it is that this feeling is displaced, somebody else’s life, always a problem with poetry and music no matter how much we love them, sometimes with transcendent feeling. I don’t even want to listen to Fleetwood Mac, and I get annoyed by what pop-cultural curators we all can be now even when I agree with somebody’s taste or admire what they are doing with it — but I like this.
There are other timely things I deeply value in this new book. The Math Campers includes beautiful, formally various and surprising poetry. There are the elegiac and critical lyrics about being a teenager in Vermont with landscapes that are both realistic and artificial. Then there is the comical, moving and unfashionable one act verse drama about the demon seed math campers. Finally, and best of all, there is an environmentally dystopian and hilarious graduation poem in Auden-like tetrameter quatrains that manages to combine a sincere celebration of New England liberalism with astronauts doing gross, but for me, amusing things. We also get Chiasson’s gardener’s eye for nature in the third-ring suburbs outside of Boston, with prop planes overhead: “a thawed field is a gold mine, / an uproar over winterberries, / chitchat along the power lines.”
Above all, The Math Campers is a warm and an affectionate book. Chiasson remembers actual teenage experience and yuks (“Boing”) and pretensions (reading poetry in diners) as well as pains that continue to nettle and joys that are similar to his own now. When the math campers show up on the campus rented out to them for summer session profits, the best thing about them is their repulsive sense of humor, and gross humor becomes a possible but regressive line of communication with them for an adult in the context of their play. There is no creepy necrophilia in his elegy for a Vermont friend who died young:
Q: Then where did Josh True go?
A: Into the maw, the void, the abyss
Q: By violence, by illness, by neglect?
A: By none of these causes did he go.
Q: Like a god strode into storms and water?
A: Neither by lightning no by drowning.
Q: Then by his beauty, and the gods’ jealous?
A: He looked like Tyne Daly
Wearing an antimatter toupee.
He did not die valiantly,
The Earth turned, and he stood still.
This somehow keeps true to the spirit of a friendship, the timestamp of its references and an almost heavy-metal and heroic level of diction, the thing enjoyed by friends knowingly, and it enacts the growth away from the formerly common language with honesty and grace and dispatch. “Josh True” might be made up for all I know, the way memory falsifies his hair, not that it wasn’t beautiful, or the poem admits its artifice, but this feels right, some pale fire at least partially made-up in the absence of actually being there, turning 20, getting into some Nabokov maybe, no matter how unlikely the circumstances. Getting judgy is sad. Do you remember enjoying The Book of Laughter and Forgetting? If Josh True were not made up, he is now. Almost 50? Shit. Rounds up.
Thematically speaking, the book gets how creepy any success in this country has become. Maybe Chiasson takes his satire even further; his own house is displayed in the form of a mural based on his poems, a mural that threatens to eat everybody who uses the stairs. At the very least, things feel gothic there, particularly in the second ekphrastic poem that closes the book. At first glance, the presence of the mural seems celebratory and self-referential. The second time around, the presentation darkens. Thanks, Harvard Duke Stanford Yale, thanks for Jared and Stevie Miller and Zuck, three tubes of the apocalypse, pep boys. Thanks, all you houses of admissions, houses of punishment and reward, chirpy choruses of math campers. Chances are likely that somebody who makes it through has either been lucky or tortured, like Chiasson’s figure who has been in one way or another “hit, hard on the face, and then again. // Though afterwards, he was given tea.” It’s surprising that such an affable poet has something so important to say about the animating spirit of humiliation that runs through the culture. I hear that nobody gets belted anymore. Lucky kids. Maybe that is also folklore. The culture of either success or failure by numbers or right answers, even by Pi, is probably mental violence enough to bend anybody. Math campers are nothing new; their obtuse imaginations and currency trickle around seemingly from on high if nothing else does.
How will people understand the partial nitwits that they grow up with and into, and the sad things that they will do and have done to each other if they don’t keep reading things that they have to push back against? Poetry has dislodging and comforting resources beyond its self-referential traps and gaps, beyond egoism, its status networks, stars, good grades, manners, its crud, resources that Chiasson might be calling “Euphrasy and Rue,” the herbal salve given one meaning by Milton, what the angel uses so an original person can see the whole story, the good news ahead and the bad on the way out of Eden, and which gets turned into a description of an opium high by Thomas De Quincy over 100 years later, and so you can say that the old herbs were ripe for a healthier reinvention.
Chiasson does not come after Milton and De Quincy. He gets between them because satire is always for what gets left out of any version. Euphrasy and Rue get to fly away from their parents a bit. Lucky kids, flying over the suburbs. I know. They might be the kinds of oblong kids who really do well and move with gusto and bright sparks between math and poetry. Odds are, this fall they will be stuck at home.
[Published by A.A.Knopf on September 22, 2020, 128 pages, $27.00 hardcover]