Reviews and Features

Ahren Warner Ideas of the Sublime

C K WILLIAMS
Wait
Bloodaxe £9.95

RAE ARMANTROUT
Versed
Wesleyan $14.95

ANGIE ESTES
Tryst
Oberlin College Press $15.95

Wait is C K Williams’s seventeenth collection of poetry. It is a book that reinforces his position as the great contemporary poet of the sublime. Here, I should mention Edmund Burke’s famous statement that ‘whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’ (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful). It is not only that Williams’s poetry is ‘conversant about terrible objects’, but rather that his is a poetry which is ‘productive’ of powerful emotional affect, a poetry of both awe and horror as well as, in spite of Burke, a virtuoso poetic beauty:

she’s feeding two of herself – she’ll abandon it soon,
and migrate; the chick will doubtlessly starve.

Humans don’t do that, just leave, though a young
     woman
I saw rushing through the train station this morning
with a Down’s syndrome infant in a stroller
I thought might if she could ... (‘Thrush’)

The lines quoted above are exemplary of Williams’s sublime. The thought captures the raw conflict between maternal affection and the burden of a disabled child; the willingness of the poet to offer up such honesty (and to give it a primal accent via the analogy of woman and bird) and the capturing of a brutal humanity are classic Williams. Yet, it is Williams’s ability not just to be conversant with the terrible but to be ‘productive’ – to obligate the reader, via his lyric skill, into an emotional response which is both horrific and satisfying – that makes the poems of Wait so good:

“Shrapnel throughout the body” is how a ten-year-old killed in a
     recent artillery offensive is described.

“Shrapnel throughout the body”: the phrase is repeated along with
     the name of each deceased child

in the bulletin released as propaganda by our adversaries, at whose
     operatives the barrage was directed.

There are photos as well – one shows a father rushing through the
     street, his face torn with a last frantic hope...

The poem which contains these lines, ‘Shrapnel’, is one of the tours de force of Wait. It is a bipartite poem, which seamlessly weaves prose citations from Ian McEwan’s Atonement and various non-fiction accounts of shrapnel into the poet’s trademark long lines. The great tragic tension of this passage is the way in which the father’s hope is anticipated, or pre-emptively negated, by Williams’s diction leading up to it. The shrapnel is ‘throughout’; it is stripped of its explosive kinetics. The brilliantly precise ‘bulletin’ is, though cognate with bullet, only ‘released’; the barrage is only ‘directed’. The terror of weaponry is amplified by the way it is subverted, muted, stripped of its movement. Yet, when the father appears he is ‘rushing’ and his expression hits the reader (as the shrapnel or bullet[in] would have been expected to) as ‘torn’, ‘frantic’ – all the words one expected to see with shrapnel but which were deferred to communicate the horror of the father’s desperation.

To place emphasis on a kind of modern (post-Baudelairean) sublime as the subject of, and as that which is communicated by, Williams’s poems must not detract from their other facets. There is a tenderness in Wait all the more profound for the way it is weaved through various permutations of the terrible, as in ‘Roe vs. Wade’ or ‘Wood’. There is also a utilization of cadence and rhythm, particularly in the poems of long lines, which is often mind-boggling. Further, there is a brilliant sense of humour at work:

First I did my thing, that’s to say her thing, to her, for her,
               then she did her thing, I mean my thing to me, for me
then we did our thing together... (‘Back’)

Williams’s technical virtuosity is well established. Yet the sequence ‘Still, Again: Martin Luther King, April 4, 2008’ is really a masterclass in prosodic dexterity. Stripped of all punctuation, they rely for their sense and effect on Williams’s manipulations of rhythm and intonation. A complex, fugue-like narrative thread is carried via a rhythmic structuring that telescopes interrelated clauses into poems with an extraordinary sense of propulsion. A transcendence of grammatical notation and mastery of stress substitutes produces lines such as these:

televisions gone blind the heaters and coolers blowers and vacuums
     machines for making
other machines he hovers over the waste-holes driven into the earth
     chemical slops nuclear scum
grease so much surplus in a landscape of want and the humans the
     humans discarded in prisons
two million in prisons he counts them two million in prisons counts
     again two million
stacked up in absolute violence absolute terror absolute torpor two
     million coiled cocked...

Finally, it should be said that it is probably the range of Wait that is the most startling thing about it. For, fundamentally, Williams’s new book – in its mix of the terrible and the tender, its liberal peppering of humour and its sheer verbal generosity – is a book which feels fully ‘human’, which manages to agglomerate the many facets of the humanity Williams witnesses into a moving and magnificent collection.

Rae Armantrout’s tenth collection, Versed, has won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Armantrout’s distinctive style occasionally offers up a genuine epiphany, emotional solicitation or moment of resonance such as in the following section from her poem ‘Inscription’:

As if you
could become another person
by setting off
an automatic
cascade of responses
in his/her body.

Here, the cadence of Armantrout’s short, metronomically enjambed lines tick along and culminate in the perfectly impersonal ‘his/her’ which accents the difficulty of communication (a preoccupation of Armantrout’s) and of sexual difference so well. Or, take the following lines from the poem ‘Help’:

A space
“inside”

can’t bear
to be un-

interrupted.

The tension in these lines which Armantrout plays off – the tension of the negative ‘un’ developing into the positive ‘uninterrupted’ (as well as the cruder notion of an interrupted uninterrupted) – is both deft and effective. However, such moments of entertainment or of agile expression in Armantrout’s poems seem all too rare. Most often, her poems resolve themselves in lines like these from ‘Pleasure’:

This sense of
my senses

being mine
is what passes

life to life?

How distinguish one
light from the next?

Only distinctions can
matter.
(Canned matter.)

What we are presented with here seems more like ‘canned philosophy’; a splicing of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale or Derrida’s De la grammatologie into very short lines. So too with the lines from ‘Relations’ which read ‘Time flows / because no set / of proofs // can be complete’: lines which are successful only to the extent of forging the tired avant-garde preoccupation with the self-referential into a singularly unoriginal figure for provisional experience.

Passages such as those cited recur throughout Versed with jarring frequency. The music of Armantrout’s poetry also disappoints. The monotony of her prosody, the incessant regularity of indeterminate caesuras (effected either by line or section breaks) restricts the variety and subtlety of the rhythms she might offer as well as muting the discursive potentiality of the poems (a facet so important in the work of William Carlos Williams, to whom she has been compared).

Angie Estes’s Tryst shares several of the key preoccupations of Armantrout’s book – language, the difficulty of communication, a certain philosophical bent – but in her emphasis on the materiality of language, her willingness to open up the personal into the interpersonal and her fusion of historical and human forms of memory, Estes delivers an exciting collection
of poems.

We drove home
over the Potomac while the lights spread
their tails across the water, comets
leaving comments on a blackboard
sky like the powdered sugar
medieval physicians blew
into patients’ eyes to cure
their blindness.

These lines from the poem ‘Gloss’ illustrate the complexity and subtlety of Estes’s sensibility; her recurring concern with the medieval weaves its way in to a night-time drive through contemporary America to offer up a dynamic, expansive simile for the sky. A certain ocular weakness is conjured via the physician’s hopeless cure for blindness which bolsters the sense of Estes’s spectator being overcome by the spectacle, whilst Estes’s ability with word play echoes softly between ‘comets’ and ‘comments’.

Elsewhere in the book the historical is foregrounded, as in her masterful triptych ‘First Life of St Francis’.

Magnificat anima mia, My soul magnifies, etches
            its way in florid Gothic script across the page
until in the final line, two descenders, long tails
            of q and f, mark where the stem of sweet violet
slits the page, disappears, and then comes up
            again.

These lines, the opening of ‘Folios 20 and 74’, are a good example of the way in which Estes can make the substantial, or thingly, shimmer into a poetry which is musically and technically accomplished. Yet, it is also the way in which Estes can effect a convincing kind of metamorphosis (in this poem as well as many others) between the receptacles of historical memory which she is so enamored by and her own personal memory that makes her poems so fascinating.

Of course, Estes’s book has the odd fault. Occasionally her need to communicate information results in a clunky prosody such as ‘one of the world’s great // ports, a major connection between / Europe and Asia, “third entrance / of the Suez Canal”,’ (‘The House in Good Taste’). Further, her tick of citing lines in a foreign language and continuing by translating them, as in ‘Takeoff’, can become annoying: ‘so Delilah sings Mon coeur / s’ouevre à ta voix. My heart opens / at your voice’. Yet, at her best – and Tryst is a book which offers many brilliant poems, Estes fuses an intellectual integrity with an emotional intensity that is often astounding. Witness the poem ‘Nevers’ which begins with Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and weaves itself via Manon and a meditation on Japanese hospitality to Hiroshima and the following, wonderful lines:

I was never
               younger than I was in Nevers,
says the woman in Hiroshima
               Mon Amour, and her lover always
replies, out of the thousand things
               in your past, I choose Nevers. Now the moon
is a missing plate, facing
               each evening as if it were the telegram
my father sent my mother
               in 1944 on the day before
they married, saying, Arriving
               tomorrow. Stop. Don’t stop.