Griffonage
and stardust
David McCooey
Brian
Henry and Andrew Zawacki (eds)
Verse: The Second Decade Vol. 21, Nos 1–3
Verse, 624 pp, 0268 3830
IN
THIS
SPECIAL anniversary issue of the North American journal Verse,
subtitled The Second Decade, one can find a poem by Ethan
Paquin called ‘New Form’. Its first line reads: ‘Ablution
when stitched with pertussitine hate.’ Pertussitine? One
of the most striking things about this large, impressive collection
of contemporary poetry is its penchant, indeed rage, for the obscure
word. After a while, I just left the Shorter Oxford next
to me when I was reading, but it didn’t always help when
I came across words like ‘usufruct’, ‘blisson’,
‘eldritch’, ‘rutabagas’ (North American for
‘swedes’), ‘alginate’, ‘geode’,
‘arroyos’, ‘aretes’ (those last four from
one poem), ‘catafalque’, ‘cartouche’, ‘penetralia’,
‘solatium’, ‘griffonage’, ‘exogamous’,
‘matutinal’ and (twice) ‘pled’ (the past participle
of ‘plead’). It’s a mildly interesting parlour
game to see which words my computer recognises.
Verse is drunk with words, in love with the arcane. Looking
over my own griffonage (scribble or scrawl), in the form of my
notes for this review, I see a number of salient features regarding
this attraction to arcane words. There is the attention to the
materiality of language, to language as a ‘fallen’ medium,
to poetry, one might say, ‘after theory’. There is also
an attraction to language as a game, to riddle poems and to cerebral
poetry. This latter feature is seen in the many slyly essayistic
titles of poems: ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, ‘The Roots
of Romanticism’, ‘Nine Ways of Writing an American Poem’,
‘The Aesthetics of Dusk’, ‘The Surrealist Revolution’,
‘The Fabric of Will in the Material Landscape’, and
so on. This is poetry that, even when being playful, is pretty
serious stuff. (J.S. Harry’s ‘A Rabbit’s Introduction
to Australian History’, otherwise relevant here, is too searing
a critique of Australian attitudes to be described merely as playful.)
Such features are consistent with the journal’s seriousness.
Interestingly, there has been less need, apparently, in the US
for highbrow journals to adopt full-colour covers, themed issues
and forays into popular culture. The austerity of this journal
is a welcome astringent, and this special issue, celebrating the
journal’s second decade, is impressively low-key in presentation.
There is a one-page ‘editor’s note’ (from Brian
Henry), and indices of interviews and books reviewed in the last
ten years. Otherwise, the poetry (organised alphabetically by
author) is left to speak for itself. The size of this triple issue
is probably the most ostentatious thing about it. As well as reprinting
highlights from the last ten years, there is also a large slab
of new work.
However ‘North American’ Verse may seem in its
unadorned commitment, it is impressively internationalist in spirit.
In this anniversary issue, there are 250 poets represented from
more than two dozen countries. Of these, about 100 are not from
the US. As this issue illustrates, Verse has had an impressive
roster of contributors: notables include John Ashbery, Paul Muldoon,
Kenneth Koch, Charles Simic, Peter Redgrove and Peter Porter (who
has, for me, two of the collection’s best poems).
Porter’s name is one of the more obvious examples of an ‘Australian
connection’ concerning Verse. This connection is in
part biographical and scholarly. Both Henry and Andrew Zawacki
have visited Australia and studied its poetry. They have also
both written on Australian poetry. (Henry, as seen in his recent
ABR review of Les Murray’s The Best Australian
Poems 2004, is a forthright critic.) The ‘Australian
connection’ in this collection is quite marked. For those
interested in what Verse might offer an Australian reader
(other than 600 pages of mostly impressive or startling poetry),
they will find a stylish and authoritative international context
in which to read ‘Australian’ poetry. Australia is well
represented, with work from some of our best poets (both younger
and older).
What is interesting in this context, however, is how little poets’
nationalities matter. They are not listed by the editors. What
Australian readers see, then, is the worldliness of Australian
poetry. There are very few indications of anything as parochial
as a ‘national style’ (though the various poems translated
from European languages do tend to the dazzlingly surreal). What
is interesting are the similarities between Australian and non-Australian
poets.
No doubt the editors’ tastes are at work. (And some readers
might, like me, find the high-concept nature of most of this poetry
a little wearying after a while.) But there is more than just
editorial taste operating here. In part, this collection tells
us something about the condition of contemporary poetry itself.
Laurie Duggan in his latest book, Mangroves (2003), has
this to say about contemporary poetry: ‘Most poetry exists
as a kind of memorial for its lost self; it inhabits the realm
of the cultural artifact “poem” like a tramp in a condemned
apartment building.’ Poetry exists, Duggan points out, in
a post-poetic age. This is especially resonant for poets as sophisticated
as those published by Verse. Its resonance can be seen
in the tension in this collection between lyrical and anti-lyrical
impulses (often within the one poem). Peter Johnson’s prose
poem ‘The Hero’, for instance, begins: ‘End of
the twentieth century and I’m still angry. The new hero same
as the old hero. And the poets? They’re in the backyard playing
in the wet mulch, writing each other love letters with bird shit
on brown paper bags.’ Or else there is the figure in John
Tranter’s ‘The Twilight Guest’ who ‘purchased
/ a little cottage by the lake — / fresh-water, not salt
— / and sat waiting for poetry’.
At its worst, the poetry in Verse can seem indistinguishable
and arid. Sometimes whole poems are like glosses on obscure words
or even a collection of obscure words. Sometimes the wrenching
of syntax can be plain annoying, but for the most part this collection
is compelling. Sometimes, as in the case of the extracts from
Joe Wenderoth’s ‘Letters to Wendy’s’ (Wendy’s
being a fast food chain), it is compellingly weird and unsettling,
even terrible: ‘The road to heaven is paved with meat: the
road to meat is not paved at all.’ More quietly unsettling
are the poems by James Tate (especially ‘Intruders’)
and Charles Simic.
Much of the Australian poets’ work looks uncannily at home.
Emma Lew’s extraordinary poems no longer seem ‘unAustralian’
in their tropes or content (with their references to crinoline,
wolves, flax, lairs of spies, and so on). John Kinsella’s
utterly original interventions in landscape poetry show the strange
connections between antipodean and Northern places and ways of
thinking. Similarly, Tracy Ryan’s marvellous, essayistic
‘Mallee Root’ presents the peculiarly local in a richly
cosmopolitan way.
One of the best poems in the collection is by the Melbourne poet
Peter Steele. His ‘Stardust’ is both engagingly lyrical
and brilliantly erudite. Like the old jazz tune that shares its
title (at least as played by Louis Armstrong), it is simultaneously
sparkling and heartbreaking. It is also, appropriately for this
collection of poems, global in its scope, taking in ‘our
curious planet’ from the Grand Canyon to the Sargasso, from
the ‘rowed incessancy of cornfields’ to the ‘quilt
of cities’. Verse: The Second Decade, as a whole,
gives witness to such variety and strangeness. It is hardly any
surprise, then, that I discover from it the meanings, perhaps
even the poetry, of ‘alginate’, ‘cartouche’
and ‘solatium’.
David
McCooey teaches at Deakin University.
