What a week! I am still reeling from Robert Archambeaus review of my New Poems, a section of his essay about rhyme in contemporary poetry, Inventions of a Barbarous Age, just published in the Spoon River Poetry Review: Ben Mazer is also a poet open to influence—indeed, he is a very literary poet, even an aesthete, whose vocabulary, characteristic gestures, and turns of phrase emerge from a life spent rambling among endless shelves of poetry: Auden, Marlowe, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, and Keith Douglas seem to number among his favorites, as do Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, John Crowe Ransom, and Landis Everson, whose poems Mazer has edited. It is an idiosyncratic curriculum, and Mazer is an idiosyncratic poet. More often than not his poems rhyme, but despite the presence in New Poems of the long, loosely constructed sonnet sequence, The King, we dont find a love of formal construction such as we find with R.S. Gwynn. Nor do we find rhymes that seek to dazzle with Byronic novelty, and theres nothing like the allusive crypt-rhyming we get with Michael Robbins. More than any contemporary poet of whom I know, Mazer is committed to the idea that a poem is not so much a well-wrought thing as it is something that comes to the poets ear, and emerges without much intervention of his will. Rhyme, for him, is a fundamental part of this mode of composition. As he puts it, I do not think about [rhyme] or plan it: it comes when the expression of meaning of emotion calls for it. Rhyme, seen or understood in this way, is not an artificial contrivance meant to keep some arbitrary system or standard: it comes as easily as leaves to a tree in the unconscious mind… The allusion to Keats famous dictum that if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all is indicative both of Mazers commitment to poetry that emerges from the unconscious, and of the way his mind is conditioned by literary sources. It should come as no surprise, really, that the spontaneous language of Mazers poetry is frequently a language of rhymed couplets. One of the major influences on Mazer is clearly John Ashbery. We see it in the combination of high and popular culture (Hildegaard of Bingen rubs shoulders with Archie & Jughead) and in the elliptical pseudo-narratives that create moods but refuse clearly defined resolution. We see it, too, in the way the poems revel in aesthetic escapism, a turning from the world of power to the world of beauty. Consider these lines from Dinner Conversation: I have to work. The ruling class wishes to suffer. The poor sit on their ass. History and archaeology revive fear of the gods, the instinct to take a wife. A rich mans daughters are posted to inventories. The visiting statesman approves of the lawn frieze. The Botticelli bursts another spring. It is of Florentine silks that I shall sing. This rough and tumble clan will expire in madness to a man. Ah, to be mad, that must be truly glorious, to see each word as a sign and write in prose. (6) Wealth, dynasties, politics, class conflict are all here, as is the use of art in the creation of prestige—but the loved world is one of art for its own sake. What should a poem praise? Florentine silk. And what is prose for? The mad pursuit of endless signs. Aesthetic pursuits raise us above mundane concerns, and rhyme comes in as a sign of the poems status as an aesthetic rather than a utilitarian object. In fact, the only resolution the poem finds, in its evocative wanderings, is an aesthetic one, where we shift from couplets to an ABAxB pattern, marking closure in terms of form if not in terms of narrative: In my dream they thought I had stolen clothes (books I had borrowed from the library). The horizon is never permitted to doze. The real shipment of gold is emblazoned in flames for all to see. (6-7) The ethos or sensibility is clear enough: alienation from forms of power and authority (from those who see the speaker as a thief, from librarians, even); and a sense that real wealth is not the gold in vaults, but the gold emblazoned in the sky at sunset. Mazer is a Bohemian aesthete, and his rhymes here indicate a love of sound, and of the gesture of closure. The rhyming couplets Poem for the First Day of Spring give us, as do many of Mazers poems, a kind of elliptical meditation on the nature of the aesthetic. The vampires coffin in Los Angeles is kept company by an ape named Barabas. Sunlight through the basement windows all day projects dust motes where the ape and the coffin play. This shadow was once a movie star, this grave is a science experiment that the last actors crave. Whoever comes here, Thelma or Clara or Theda, will go in silence, paying homage to Rita. Children come home from school, but that is all. The lawn is trimmed, and the slate arches pall. (8) The opening couplet hints that the vampire is a kind of Christ figure—dead but ready to rise, and accompanied by an ape whose name evokes the man spared from crucifixion instead of Jesus. The vampire was once a film star, and is still important to other film stars (the catalog of womens names gestures toward Thelma Todd, Clara Bow, Theda Bara, and Rita Hayworth—all the but last from the silent film era). But is he important to those who did not participate in the art? The world beyond seems orderly but indifferent: new generations are unconcerned, and the ending landscape seems very much like a cemetery. The poem is more pregnant with possible meaning than overtly meaningful, but one of the interpretive possibilities is certainly connected to the notion of an aging art-form, loved more by its practitioners than by the larger world, an art form removed from the busy world and preserved in formal beauty. It might very well be the art of poetry—especially of poetry in rhyme—that awaits rebirth, here, in Mazers couplets. At times, Mazer turns his gaze onto the process of composition itself, as in Avion, Gorrion. Here, the title words are poetic donnée, the gift-phrase that came unbidden to his ear. The rhyme comes first, a charm of sound, redolent of possible meaning. Avion is French for airplane, but it is also a boys given name meaning, appropriately, gift of God; a gorrion is a term sometimes used for a specific kind of sparrow, and gorrión is the common Spanish word for sparrow, so already we sense rich possibilities having to do with imagination, flight, and the divine. The poem begins in wonder: Avion, Gorrion What does this mean? DC-3 divisible by three A bilingual entelechy. (12) One senses that the rhyme may be driving the sentence more than anything else, but the notion that the donnée is an entelechy—an essence that has fully realized itself, as an oak tree is the realized essence of an acorn—is intriguing. The poem continues in long stanzas, each beginning with And what of/avion, Gorrion and threading bits of narrative about the moment when the phrase came to Mazer on a rainy street with speculations on how the phrase might generate meaning for him and for others. In the end, though, we come back to the sense of the donnée as an entelechy, as full in and of itself: Avion. Gorrion. Say it again, but do not understand the imprint of its meaning. …. There is no need to understand or visit what has been left behind, what cannot name itself for fear of belying its greater importance, stumbled on, perhaps, in the rain. (15) One is reminded of Wallace Stevens Of Mere Being, where we are confronted with the palm at the end of the mind, where [a] gold-feathered bird / Sings in the palm, without human meaning, / Without human feeling, a foreign song. For Stevens, it is an image that we find at the end of all interpretation, a fabulous bird whose fire-fangled feathers dangl[e] down. For Mazer, the irreducible experience is not an image: it is a rhyme.
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 23:16:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015