poetry in review

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P O E T R Y I N

R E V I E W

S T E P H E N Y E N S E R

Postmodern poetry means either poetry written after and in thevarious light of modernism or, more narrowly, poetry composed inthe ominous umbrage of Possum, Pound & Cie and based on arevisionist version of its poetics. The distinction cannot always bemade, but some poets tend to take modernism in stride and adaptor develop from it, while others, more theoretically self-conscious,tend to define and react to it. (I leave aside the poetry, like someneo-formalism, that tends to ignore it.) Joshua Clover’s new vol-ume makes no bones about its claim to bear the flamboyant stan-dard of the second kind of poet. Rather than fellow poets orreviewers, two well-known avant-garde theorists contribute theback-cover blurbs, and both observe that Clover’s poems responddramatically to modernist aesthetics. Charles Altieri (The Art

of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After)thinks of the poems as ‘‘crossing the cool, allusive intimacy of

T h e T o t a l i t y f o r K i d s , by Joshua Clover (University of California Press, 76 pp., $16.95 paper)

S a l l y ’ s H a i r : P o e m s , by John Koethe (HarperCollins, 82 pp., $24.95)

O o g a - B o o g a , by Frederick Seidel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 95 pp., $24)

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Quentin Tarrantino with the abstract, intense social passion ofWalter Benjamin,’’ while Judith Butler (Precarious Life: The

Powers of Mourning and Violence) muses that they ‘‘form an ur-ban and linguistic landscape of contemporary life in many ways,written in the shadow of Adorno, who himself wrote in theshadows of the modern.’’ Refreshingly academic and right on tar-get, the blurbs also imply that forthcoming anthologies of recentAmerican poetry will have plenty of space for Clover’s work.

The Totality for Kids aspires to rival ‘‘The Waste Land ’’ and

Other Poems in its capacity as epitome of a period and style, theself-consciously postmodern, a burgeoning tradition mediatedhere by a considerable individual talent. The book does not buildon T. S. Eliot’s early work, though it harbors numerous allusions toit, so much as it manipulates and updates Eliot’s techniques andtopics. Wryly satisfying his publisher, Eliot shocked his readerswith endnotes; winking at his readers, Clover might have sur-prised his publisher with an index. Eliot, famously invisible, worethe guises of Tiresias and other dramatis personae; Clover makeshimself into one of his: ‘‘Joshua, why are you so obsessed with themodern/And its endnotes . . . ?’’ Eliot’s endnotes linked his poemto certain religions; Clover’s index connects his with a history ofsocial activism that reaches back through the Language Poets tothe Parisian Situationists and anarchists of the 1960s to Hegelian-ism and well beyond. Eliot traced his concern with the city assubject matter to Charles Baudelaire; Clover turns Eliot and Bau-delaire to his own ends.

Baudelaire gets only two entries in the index, and in view of hiscontinuous influence in this volume, the range marked out bythose two is teasingly telling. The first refers to an early pagewhere the French poet’s desideratum of ‘‘poetic prose,’’ a phrasethat quickly became a cliché, appears in supererogatory, tongue-in-cheek quotation marks, and the second to a page where if noone phrase explicitly recalls Baudelaire, the whole thing might doso, with its allusions to ‘‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’’ (whichBaudelaire translated) and the city (which as so often here seemsto be Paris) and its garbage. Eliot, for his part, shows up just oncein the index, where we are directed to the opening of the firstpoem, ‘‘Ceriserie,’’ one of the most impressive in this collection.We do not know which words Clover wants us to link with Eliot,

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but we couldn’t be wrong to turn first to the opening lines, espe-cially the fourth and fifth:

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.Music: Known as the Philosopher’s Stair for the world-

weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowherewith it.

Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.Paris: You’re falling into disrepair, Ei√el Tower this means

you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quartonwhispering come with me under the shadow of this goldleaf.

Perhaps we won’t all think of ‘‘Ash Wednesday,’’ with its notori-ously precocious weltschmerz and its demanding stair, but anyonewill hark back to London Bridge’s ‘‘falling down’’ and the ‘‘fallingtowers’’ in The Waste Land – as well as to the gold or gilt in thatpoem’s ‘‘A Game of Chess’’ and to its various instances of ‘‘whispermusic,’’ including most notably the sly invitation ‘‘(Come in underthe shadow of this red rock).’’ Clover’s gambit is a brilliant pas-tiche, reinforced later in this poem by a fragment reminiscent of‘‘The Burial of the Dead’’ (his portmanteau echo of the Germanand Marie’s ‘‘there you feel free’’ is ‘‘frei aber einsam’’), a glimpseof the modern moment and the fisher-king (‘‘The first silence ofthe century then the king weeping’’), and a cute revision of Eliot’sobservation in ‘‘Whispers of Immortality’’ that John Webster sawthe skull beneath the skin (‘‘Steve Evans: I saw your skull! It wasbetween your thought and your face’’).

Steve Evans’s work includes an essay, entitled ‘‘ContinuousPresent: On Hearing Modernism in Contemporary Poetry,’’ whoseburden is that ‘‘The dialectic . . . – between the modern and thecontemporary as horizons for one another’s interpretation andevaluation – can open a process of reciprocal critique capable ofvaluably contributing to the ongoing . . . interrogation of whatconstitutes the radical in poetic practice.’’ In Clover’s case, ‘‘theradical’’ manifests itself in the insouciance and ingenuity withwhich he appropriates and displays ‘‘the modern.’’ Ideally, hiscombination of texts is not seamless, and the more recognizablethe poet’s sources, the better the reader can play the game.

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And make no mistake, Clover’s is a poetry ludic in the extreme.The rule on the sign in the Jardin des Plantes that he incorporatesin ‘‘Ceriserie,’’ ‘‘games are forbidden in the labyrinth,’’ is itselfanathema in this literary maze. Games are invited and, indeed,necessitated. The designer of ‘‘this urban and linguistic land-scape,’’ to borrow from Butler, follows in the footsteps not of BaronGeorges-Eugène Haussmann, a recurrent figure in the book, akind of anti-hero who organized, ventilated, and lit a previouslylabyrinthine, mysterious, and dangerous Paris, but of Gilles Ivain,the author of ‘‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’’ (1953), a fragmen-tary visionary tract on ‘‘the architecture of tomorrow’’ that meantto rectify the ‘‘banalization’’ of today by reverting to a spiritualsensibility akin to that of the Middle Ages and the tales of thatday: tomorrow’s people ‘‘will live in their own personal cathedrals’’within a magical and metamorphic city whose districts ‘‘couldcorrespond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that oneencounters by chance in everyday life.’’ Clover’s highly selectiveindex has but one entry for Ivain, but he alludes to the ‘‘Formu-lary’’ on so many occasions that it is a useful companion to thesepoems, which provide a kind of analogue to the city the tract envi-sions. Again, Eliot, in ‘‘Prufrock’s’’ merger of the poetic and theurban (‘‘certain half-deserted streets,/The muttering retreats . . ./Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent’’),provides the model to be modified. For Clover, ‘‘the line is some-thing like a lamp-lit way onto which you have just turned,’’ the‘‘line break we would call darkness, for there the street ends, thelamp fails,’’ ‘‘the city cannot be said to have a logic any more/Than the alphabet,’’ and ‘‘Streets lead to rueful dreaming’’ (wecome across the appropriately double-edged ‘‘Rue No Fun’’ nowand then in this noirishly comic volume), while ‘‘workers [hoist]the new noun into the hacienda of the air.’’

The city-literature conceit is the book’s most fruitful. When weread at the end of one of the two poems called ‘‘Whiteread Walk’’(in the index we can find ‘‘Whiteread, Rachel,’’ but nowhere isthere a clear indication of the relationship between the Britishsculptor’s work and Clover’s) that ‘‘the taxi came thwack we droveinto a book,’’ we recognize our experience in reading these poems,as we do when the speaker in ‘‘At the Atelier Teleology’’ avers that‘‘There is no pleasure like wasting time in your city divided into


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quarters sisters and zones/Beneath the clattering gears of themoon and the sun/Oh most industrial and beguiling of lullabies.’’The same motif produces some of the rampant wordplay. Hiddenin the ‘‘Atelier’’ of the last poem quoted, for instance, is the nameof Altieri, to whom (the Acknowledgments quietly inform us) thispoem is dedicated. In the same anagrammatic vein, if not aswittily, Paris is the ‘‘City of Praise,’’ and, much better, the poementitled ‘‘Aporia’’ begins with the enviable trouvaille ‘‘Peoria!’’This jeu de mots is one of many occasions that Clover makes usthink of Lord Byron, that antemodern postmodern. Later in thepoem, Peoria gets Paris’s own sobriquet when Clover apostrophizesit as ‘‘Midwestern city o’ lights’’ – just before he lets himselfinvoke Vernon (Illinois) as ‘‘Glamorous . . . city of canals.’’

One implication of such nomenclatorial lubricity is our cities’increasing sameness. They are closer together and share theirpasts. If we are ‘‘trapped in a cocoon of continuous presence’’ madeup of modernist and postmodernist voices, as Steve Evans has it,we hear those voices at once in Peoria and Paris. To put it anotherand narrower way, Clover takes Wallace Stevens’s dictum that‘‘French and English are one language’’ seriously enough that hecoins such satisfyingly gaudy phrases as ‘‘this world,/This half-read hebdomaire, this jacquerie of knickknacks’’ and ‘‘winter’spitcher of noircotic ink’’ and ‘‘twin cruets of jizz and sang.’’(Though why he translates A bas le sommaire, vive l’éphèmere, oneof the Marxist gra≈ti put up during the May, 1968, uprising inParis, as ‘‘beneath the abstract lives the ephemeral’’ rather thansomething like ‘‘Down with the abstract, long live the transitory’’is unclear.) He also provides both a French and an English versionof one poem – the first of which is ironically ‘‘Qu’y-a-t-il d’Ameri-cain dans la poésie Américaine?’’ – and entitles another after theanthem of the French Revolution, ‘‘Ça ira.’’ (The latter poem’slines, radiating from an empty central circle, recall both StéphaneMallarmé’s egg poems, which may be begun with any line, andGuillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes.) So it is that, in a momentof characteristically O’Hara-like Whitmania, Clover can declare toVernon-Venice – with its ‘‘Five-step bridges with arcane gra≈ti’’and its ‘‘three million atavistic/Pigeons at the heart of a jewel-box/Labyrinth and its ancient library/Drooping languorouslyinto the lagoon/A few inches per annum bearing Tom Swift/

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Down to the Doges’’ – that ‘‘Everywhere at once I must be withyou!’’

I take this sense of ubiquity and simultaneity to be both thematrix and a chief theme, which he regards with the expectedskepticism, of Clover’s book: ‘‘as the pocket philosophes often say‘everything is connected’//An idea that casts the Janus-shadows ofparanoia and mysticism and still is not mistaken.’’ Hence The

Totality for Kids, as if to say The Universe for Children or TheGestalt for Beginners – though the phrase derives from the title ofKen Knabb’s translation of Raoul Vaneigem’s Situationalist pam-phlet Banalités de base. Because the book participates, howevermodestly, in this vast network, it has its own reticulations andfractals. (‘‘It turns out everything is the world in miniature.’’) Theopening poem’s title, ‘‘Ceriserie,’’ must indicate both a greenhousefor cherry trees (like ‘‘orangerie’’) and a cherry series, or suite, orcollection of the fruit of the poet’s labors. If these fruits might seemonce to have been cultivated in Arcadia, they can or must now beproduced in the city. In ‘‘Year Zero,’’ implicitly set at the beginningof the new era, which follows the postmodern revolution, ‘‘it comesdown to inventing flowers.//This they do down at the flower fac-tory over the bridge from the factory where cherries tumble fromthe cherry-making machinery.’’ In the epitaphic conclusion of thelast poem, ‘‘At the Atelier Teleology,’’ ‘‘we,’’ the descendants of theHollow Men, are situated in a ‘‘black suburb’’ of Paris and Man-hattan, where Nicolas Poussin and Ezra Pound, Brigitte Bardot’sposes and Groucho Marx’s jokes, the calendar of the French Revo-lution and the aftermath of the American Civil War are all equallyrelevant. It is a kind of time capsule for Western civilization:

The art of the present comes down to four discrepant imagesof B.B. turning toward us, toward our shared machine eye,our deep disfluency. Out past Arrival Street we go to theblack suburb, we are buried in Grant’s Tomb, Et in arcadia

ego, we walk in the garden of his turbulence, Et in arcadia

ego, we are in a station of the metro, we are lost in the editingof July, we too lived in arcades in arcades you will find us.

These sentences return us to the poet’s home key – and to thebeginning of The Waste Land, where ‘‘we’’ recall stopping ‘‘in thecolonnade’’ or arcade of the Hofgarten in Munich.


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Clover subtly reiterates the presence of the past by means ofself-quotation. Here is a note to himself in the first poem – a notethat reminds us in passing to think of this as a work in process: ‘‘Tosay about Flemish painting: ‘Money-colored light.’ ’’ This arrest-ing phrase does indeed come up, but in another context than thatoriginally specified. In ‘‘A-Shaped Gate,’’ the ‘‘palatial arcades’’ ina träumerish vista are ‘‘Filled with a caustic ecstasy, a light moreconducive to dreams/Than any drug, like the money-colored lightof last century.’’ A ‘‘caustic ecstasy’’: more gleaming phrasing, in acollection shot through with it. In one of two alluringly meander-ing sentences that make up ‘‘Aeon Flux: June,’’ we find ourselvesagain in the neighborhood of money-colored light and ‘‘in thevicinity of sundown and all the nouns streaked with gold, drown-ing in drachmas, lounging in louche, leading from the eye to thedistant mountain the guidebooks say is uninhabitable though be-hind it squats a shack which is the summer home of God, finallyfree from making cherries for the emperor’s children.’’ It is such apassage, I think, that Clover has in mind when he refers more thanonce to the ‘‘antilyric’’ nature of his work (the adjective has its ownlyrical twist) and when he wonders whether we might ‘‘hope tosee’’ at the end of our era, if not of history altogether, ‘‘The mar-riage of the beautiful/And the trivial.’’

Such a marriage is of course one aim of Frank O’Hara and JohnAshbery, too, and a reader in a bad mood might raise an eyebrow atthe insistent a≈nities. He can be a self-conscious flâneur or amock Odysseus or a postmodern troubadour with the best of them,Clover seems to say:

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities,These pale window box poppies of the laughing class,Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as

starlight,Resemble an epic journey as a co√ee bean resembles a

llama’s foot. . . .

Not that he seeks to conceal his heritage:

The sun tutoyers me! Adrift beyond heroic realismIn the postmodern sublime where every window can lieLike a priest, adrift in the utopia for bourgeois kittens

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Having of late learned the trick of how to listen to twoSongs at once – double your measure double your fun! – It seems to defy death and still the commodityIs not cast down. I say Frank O’Hara was an anarchist,Nothing else explains all that joy! Exclamation point!

The coy, the arch, the smug, the cavalier, the self-assuredly hip:these are the usual tones, and they can be cloying:

We always send it to the wrong addressAnd now that buoys even our most impersonal days.

Everyone is beautiful!And then almost everyone. C’est cool-ça, the shift that

enchants the worldOr at least the afternoon of the world before it’s o√To meet Chris and all at glimmering Colleen’s. . . .

‘‘Quel drag,’’ he laments after a similar tour de force, and espe-cially one hearing the pun will sigh in agreement.

Still, to try to separate these poems’ Gotham camp from theirpoignancy would be akin to trying to take the metallic threads outof the samite. Not all that glitters is gold, but there is a good dealto be said for charm and wit. Even Clover’s political philosophy, ofwhich there is a good deal, sparkles with those two qualities.While the epigraph to his first book, Madonna anno domini, camefrom Walter Benjamin, the photo of the author showed him out-doors, bare-chested, bronzé, and grinning, as though he had justspent a really cool afternoon on his surfboard. Trumping thatgesture, the photo on the inner back flap of this new book, inwhich he poses in suit and tie, head down, looking aged and angst-ridden, is a take-o√ of the jacket photo of an edition of Benjamin’sReflections. The reinforced visual pun on reflections assures usthat, first impressions notwithstanding, we should not take thepoet’s view of himself any more seriously – but of course no lessseriously – than in the case of his first book.

In Sally’s Hair, John Koethe is straightforwardly and earnestly aphilosopher (the jacket copy tells us that he is Distinguished Pro-fessor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee)as well as a poet who writes in a pentameter steadier than any I’ve


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seen by a living poet not thought of as formalist. As he puts it in‘‘Hamlet’’ – a title pertinent both to one of Richard Burton’smemorable dramatic parts and the poet’s everyday role (the life/state/page correspondence recurs throughout the book) – his lifeis a matter of ‘‘mixing poetry and philosophy/In roughly equalparts, vocation and career.’’

Whereas Clover’s postmodernism involves knowingly puttinghis predecessors in perspective, Koethe’s involves continuing theirprojects. Koethe is on easy terms with the continental philosophers,perhaps especially George Berkeley and Immanuel Kant, who cropup explicitly and underlie all the poems, and analytical and ordi-nary language philosophers as well, with Ludwig Wittgensteinproviding several touchstones. He and other philosophers are herenot to be played with but to be worked with; the assumption is thatthe issues they raised are not exhausted but remain viable. Of theseissues, all of them fundamental and familiar rather than fashion-able memes, that of the relation between the past and the present isone of the most salient. Others include time and space (‘‘place’’might be the most frequently used noun in this volume, and thenature of ‘‘home’’ is an insistent theme), freedom and necessity(‘‘constraints’’ might appear as often as ‘‘place’’), the material andthe supernatural, and everywhere language and experience.

Eliot is also a mainstay for Koethe, though it is primarily theEliot not of The Waste Land but rather of Four Quartets – the Eliotof introspective middle age, more likely to judge himself than tojudge the world at large. I’ll note a few of the many echoes – forthey are not allusions: Koethe expects us both to recognize themright away and to turn to and consider their contexts – that wehear:

These are gifts time grants:

The specious serenityOf age that hides the fearOf an anonymousFuture. An unshed tear

For what never happenedOr that happens now

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Too late. No disappointments,Just amazement at how

Much there is to seeAnd how little it all matters . . .

[‘‘In the Dark’’]

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for ageTo set a crown upon your lifetime’s e√ort.First, the cold friction of expiring sense

Without enchantment, o√ering no promiseBut bitter tastelessness of shadow fruitAs body and soul begin to fall asunder.

Second, the conscious impotence of rageAt human folly, and the lacerationOf laughter at what ceases to amuse.

And last, the rending pain of re-enactmentOf all that you have done, and been . . .

[‘‘Little Gidding’’]

Whatever else I started out to find,What I’ve arrived at is a kind of place– A temporary one – I never left,

That I can neither alter nor postpone.But it’s not going to last . . .

[‘‘The Unlasting’’]

We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time . . .


Let my purpose hence be plenitude and patienceIn the hope that through their common grace


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I might eventually attain that generous‘‘Condition of complete simplicity’’

That musing on the thought of you has let me see.I’m grateful to you then for all your questions

And objections – for indeed you are objections . . .

[‘‘To an Audience’’]

The only wisdom we can hope to acquireIs the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

[‘‘East Coker’’]

A condition of complete simplicity(Costing not less than everything)And all shall be well andAll manner of thing shall be well . . .


The passage from ‘‘To an Audience’’ presumes as well the ‘‘deadmaster’’ episode in ‘‘Little Gidding,’’ where the ‘‘you’’ is at onceanother aspect of the poet’s self and another composite figure,which in Koethe’s case includes Eliot, as in Eliot’s case the ‘‘famil-iar compound ghost’’ includes Shakespeare, whose ‘‘a√able famil-iar ghost’’ was a rival poet.

Eliot’s spirit sometimes dovetails with Walt Whitman’s (‘‘Which is where I started: with a future at my fingertips,/Permissionsgranted, free to chart the terms of an existence/‘Loos’d of limitsand imaginary lines’ ’’); Wallace Stevens is always at his beck andback (‘‘These things were good because they had to die’’); andW. B. Yeats haunts him too (‘‘Why can’t I just repeat the songs Ilearned in singing school?’’). The old masters’ voices are part andparcel of the texture of Koethe’s engrossing thought. (His acer-bically eloquent response to Robert Frost’s ‘‘The Gift Outright’’ in‘‘The Gift Undone’’ is a di√erent matter.) At least as essential are‘‘ ‘the Poets of the New York School,’/Whose easy freedom anddeflationary seriousness combined/To generate what seemed tome a tangible and abstract beauty,’’ though such ‘‘tangible’’ itemsas one often finds lodged in the webs woven by Ashbery (the poet’s

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friend, who even has a speaking cameo), James Schuyler, andKenneth Koch are rarer than the ‘‘abstract’’ element in Koethe.His title, Sally’s Hair, hints at a sensuousness that most of thepoems (I except several in the book’s last section) do not bear out.‘‘Sally’s Hair’’ itself is remarkable not for its perfunctory descrip-tion (‘‘She had the blondest hair,//Which fell across her shoul-ders’’) but for its delicate translation of anyone’s romantic memoryinto an epiphanic image of ‘‘the blond light’’ of a summer after-noon in the present:

It’s like living in a light bulb, with the leavesLike filaments and the sky a shell of thin, transparent glassEnclosing the late heaven of a summer day, a canopyOf incandescent blue above the dappled sunlight golden on

the grass.

That stanza’s ‘‘it’’ is a moment in the state of mind that Koethetries tirelessly to delineate. It is a ‘‘private’’ state of mind,

Of furniture and poetry, pottery and silent monologuesWhile shaving in the mirror, thinking through

A turn of phrase, the course of an emotion,Tracing the trajectory of a thoughtThat takes me to the kingdom of a single mindWhere what I think and feel and say are all the same.

‘‘We all live in the other one,’’ the public state in which we walkinto Wal-Marts and maquiladoras, but this private one is his breadand butter, so to speak. (The nicely judged balance in that first lineand the doubly resonant juxtaposition of ‘‘poetry, pottery’’ arecharacteristic of Koethe’s understated elegance.) The world initself might well exist, but what he knows for sure exists is thestate of mind that perceives, a ‘‘place in progress,’’ a penumbralphase, a cognitive transition defined in terms of what it is be-tween. He has found himself floating ‘‘in the air between a fleet-ing/Glimpse of nothing and the common knowledge/That laywaiting for me beyond the hills.’’ ‘‘I find myself inhabiting/A kindof no-man’s land between the thoughts/Of earth and heaven,living on the line/Between a once and future life, between/Thepassive and the possible.’’ ‘‘I find myself ’’: he repeats the phrase,


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but if he were really to find himself in this di√erent world (or‘‘world of di√erence’’) he would be lost: ‘‘I want to lose myself/Inwhat I’ve thought and felt and seen and then/Avert my eyes andlet that kingdom come.’’

This moment of discovery that is loss calls to mind a passage inWittgenstein’s ‘‘Lecture on Ethics,’’ other phrases from whichKoethe quotes, and in which Hamlet figures. If we ‘‘could write abook on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics,’’ Wittgensteinmuses, ‘‘this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the otherbooks in the world.’’ As Koethe would realize, there the philosophersounds like Stevens, as in ‘‘Prologues to What Is Possible,’’ wherethe speaker postulates an oarsman ‘‘lured on by a syllable withoutany meaning,/A syllable of which he felt . . ./That it contained themeaning into which he wanted to enter,/A meaning which, as heentered it, would shatter the boat and leave the oarsmen quiet/Asat a point of central arrival.’’ ‘‘Our words used as we use them inscience,’’ Wittgenstein tells us, ‘‘are vessels capable only of contain-ing and conveying meaning and sense, natural meaning and sense.Ethics if it is anything is supernatural and our words will onlyexpress facts; as a teacup will only hold a teapcup full of water and ifI were to pour a gallon over it . . .’’ The ellipses are Wittgenstein’s, asthough he had gone as far as possible in words.

That there might be something unsayable and thus perhapsunknowable he implies at the end of the Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus: ‘‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must re-main silent.’’ Koethe does not quote this splendidly tautologicallocus classicus, but its presence, along with the presence that can-not be named, pervades Sally’s Hair. In his closest approximationKoethe allows that there is ‘‘a nagging sense//Of something lack-ing, or of something else/Remaining to be said beyond the facts.’’(He will have in mind the Tractatus, where ‘‘the world is thetotality of facts’’ rather than of ‘‘things.’’) ‘‘Beneath it all I feel thesilent rage/Of the unspoken,’’ he writes elsewhere in ‘‘The Un-lasting’’ (a fascinating title: the unlasting – does positing it make it‘‘there’’ or not?), and in ‘‘Hamlet ’’ he stipulates a fate that, ‘‘inLarkin’s phrase, something hidden from us chose.’’ ‘‘Life,’’ he ar-gues in ‘‘A Tulip Tree,’’ is ‘‘all there is, and incomplete. But in thatlack/I find that thing’’ – again that paradox – ‘‘I’ve looked for allmy life:/A complement to life, a monument to unreality/That

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makes a world of di√erence.’’ In ‘‘Eros and the Everyday’’ he states,‘‘There’s something in the air, something I can’t quite see,/Hidingbehind this stock of images, this language/Culled from all thepoems I’ve ever loved.’’ When he dwells on this ‘‘something,’’ heresorts to words like ‘‘epiphany’’ and mystical images drawn fromthose beloved poems. ‘‘And suddenly the light that filled thetrees/Came from a summer forty years ago’’ and ‘‘a fleeting mo-ment of distraction’’ in ‘‘The Unlasting’’ ring changes, respectively,on Eliot’s vision of the dry pool suddenly ‘‘filled with water out ofsunlight’’ from centuries past and his fear of being ‘‘Distractedfrom distraction by distraction,’’ both in ‘‘Burnt Norton.’’ LikeEliot, Koethe uses seriously such terms as ‘‘soul,’’ ‘‘God,’’ ‘‘sacra-ment,’’ and ‘‘grace.’’

But Koethe is no Anglican. No sooner does he intimate theexistence of the ine√able supernatural than he contradicts histhought – or nearly does. He conjures some Eliotic or Proustian‘‘sempiternal/Moments’’ and then rounds on himself: ‘‘I don’tbelieve it.’’ He reverses that movement in ‘‘Piranesi’s Keyhole’’:

We’re grown-ups now,Long past the need for what the stories told us, for a

somewhere else

Beyond the tangible realities of daily life, beyond the veil.I know. Yet it isn’t in the end a matter of belief, but of an

impulseRooted in experience, too indiscriminate to be a thought,That says you have to go there though you know it isn’t

true. . . .

‘‘The Perfect Life,’’ the first poem, begins with a stanza repletewith ‘‘satisfaction,’’ and ‘‘anticipation,’’ ‘‘reassurance’’ – and thenmid-sentence wheels without warning into an avowal of ‘‘thefake/Security of someone in the grip of a delusion.’’ As the poemsgo by, we become accustomed to this kind of dialectic, and timeand again we find Koethe ‘‘having come full circle/And remain-ing of two minds.’’

More often than in the di√erence between the factual and thesupernatural, his interest is in the di√erence between two kinds offact: the world’s things and events, and (to the degree it is separ-able) the mind’s treatment of those things and events. His poems


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exemplify or embody that treatment, and he is therefore mostgratifying when read at a stretch, when one can get used to hissensibility, which thrives on precise conceptual nuance, and hispace, which is usually, as he admits, ‘‘lackadaisical.’’ Like other spe-cies, all poems have natural enemies, and the enemies of Koethe’skind of poem are logical discontinuity and banality, both of whichare emphasized by reading in bits. What might at first seem ‘‘un-connected moods that ebb and flow’’ turn out to be ‘‘stanzas of asingle story’’ – the story, albeit plotless, of the philosophicallyattuned meditative process. Stevens’s object, ‘‘The poem of the actof the mind,’’ has rarely seemed so relevant, and something likeMarcel Proust’s huge canvas would be ideal. Koethe took years toread Proust – he opens his eponymous poem with an uninsistentirony characteristic of his turn of mind: ‘‘I don’t remember how itstarted’’ – and he describes the experience thus: ‘‘The sentences, asyou can see, proceeded at their pace,/The pace of life.’’

His own pace has much in common with Ashbery’s, though thelatter’s work permits a stronger sense of the empirical world,which in that instance seems more detachable from the apprehen-sion of it. While it is not necessarily that Ashbery includes morevisualizable scenes, for example, he often gives us the impressionof hard edges, diverse colors, and particular connections, and hisvocabulary is broader, not only because it is more recherché, butalso because it includes more words that we commonly think of,however naively, as ‘‘concrete’’ or immediately referential. Thereare surely more varieties of trees and musical instruments in Ash-bery than in Koethe. Koethe incorporates many a phrase thatwould be frowned upon because ‘‘vague’’ in some poetry work-shops – ‘‘endless summer afternoons,’’ ‘‘a beautiful day,’’ ‘‘a Califor-nia sky,’’ ‘‘e√usive California colors,’’ ‘‘the debris on the ground,’’‘‘the ordinary April day,’’ ‘‘May sky’s deepest blue’’ – and relies onLatinate diction, often in the service of self-description:

Sometimes I wonder if thisIsn’t just my high-school vision in disguise, a naïveFantasy of knowledge that survived instead of art – Aloof, couched in the language of abstraction, flirtingNow and then with the unknown, pushing everything else

aside.

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And yet one agrees wholeheartedly with him when he writes inthe next lines in this, his concluding poem, that although ‘‘there’snothing to see’’ in it, ‘‘This place that I’ve created has the weightand feel of home.’’

An essay in a recent Poetry magazine by John Barr laments thatone problem with most contemporary American verse is that ‘‘ourpoets have all been writing in the same way for a long time now.’’They have followed modernism out to its attenuated conclusionsand further enfeebled their sensibilities by a≈liating themselveswith insular academic curricula rather than ‘‘living broadly’’ inthe extramural world and trying to ‘‘capture the way things are’’out there in order to relate to ‘‘general audiences.’’ Though bothClover and Koethe teach and both owe a debt to Eliot, the vividdi√erences between them will go some way toward suggesting thelimitations of such criticism. The work of a third distinctive post-modern poet, Frederick Seidel, makes historical sense in viewof such modernist precedents as Eliot’s appropriations of JulesLaforgue’s sonic e√ects and tones (and such early postmodernistinfluences as Robert Lowell’s way with transitions in Life Studies

and For the Union Dead), but his is also a singular achievement,which now amounts to seven volumes. That the corpus could be soconsiderable and Seidel still have a comparatively low profile istestimony to his disregard for a public persona. He abstains fromMFA programs, literary conferences, and readings, and so is notpart of the establishment that Barr alleges and disparages, but atthe same time he indulges in much that is outside the experienceof ‘‘general audiences.’’

Readers of his earlier books will predict that Seidel’s subjects inOoga-Booga are those of an unapologetic wealthy sophisticate. Hehas reservations at the Montrachet in Manhattan, taste for Haut-Brion and caviar, friends who live at 834 Fifth Avenue, suits madeon Savile Row, a favorite room at the Grand Hotel Baglioni inBologna, the opportunity to wear a ‘‘big’’ Golconda diamond on hisfinger for an afternoon, a private pilot’s license, and ‘‘One of theeight factory superbike racers/Ducati Corse will make for theyear,//Completely by hand.’’ He is Philip Levine’s very antitype.Partly because of the polish and luxury evident throughout thisbook, he has the ability even in this jaded day to jar the reader


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with his vulgarity (as when, on a binge in a prestigious restaurant,he thinks of himself as ‘‘A fist-fucking anus swallowing a fist’’),though he might well remind us simply that the opulent and theobscene are as frequently bedfellows as the parsimonious and thepuritanical – or, indeed, the puritanical and the obscene.

The funny thing is that his poems have their own frugality – orif not frugality, control. His socialite friend Diane Von Fursten-berg has said of him that ‘‘he has the most extraordinary life. Hewrites poetry all day long.’’ A self-disciplined sybarite, then? Let’slook at one way he works. The book’s initial stanza, the opening of‘‘Kill Poem’’ – which comprises ten nine-line stanzas – goes likethis:

Huntsmen indeed is gone from Savile Row,And Mr. Hall, the head cutter.The red hunt coat Hall cut for me was utterRed melton cloth thick as a carpet, cut just so.One time I wore it riding my red Ducati racer – what a

show! – Matched exotics like a pair of lovely red egrets.London once seemed the epitome of no regretsAnd the old excellence one used to knowOf the chased-down fox bleeding its stink across the snow.

Meticulous and purposeful, Seidel’s verse itself is ‘‘cut just so,’’right from its delayed pun on ‘‘Huntsmen,’’ its wry nod to EdwardFitzGerald’s Rubaiyat (‘‘Iram indeed is gone with all its Rose’’),and its double-edged term ‘‘head cutter,’’ which foreshadows the‘‘antlered heads’’ and other ‘‘trophies’’ of the hunt (associated with‘‘the old excellence one used to know’’) that appear later in thismasterful elegiac satire, through the Alexandrine at its end. (Thehip stanzas are all more or less Spenserian and dense.)

Seidel has a deep, almost inveterate appreciation of both ‘‘theold excellence’’ and the materialism it lives symbiotically with,but that doesn’t keep him from analyzing and, indeed, deftly sav-aging them. The second stanza picks up the fox’s trail:

We follow blindly, clad in coats of pink,A beast whose nature is to run and stink.I am civilized in my pink but

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Civilized is about having stu√.The red coats are called ‘‘pinks.’’ Too much is almost

enough.No one knows why they are. I parade in the airWith my stu√ and watch the disappearing scutOf a deer. I am civilized butCivilized life is actually about too much.

The ‘‘beast’’ is, of course, humankind as well as the fox. BeauBrummell, the primary sponsor of early Savile Row and the proto-typical postmodern icon, had a revolutionary obsession with clean-liness as well as with fashion, but in the end he couldn’t keep hiskind from stinking any more than he could keep us clothed. Thehunting coats – ‘‘pinks’’ – betray the British skin they cover, asSeidel emphasizes by way of his flagrant punning and enjamb-ment. And here humiliation is endless. The pink butt turns around:

I am trying not to care.I am not able not to.A short erect tailWinks across the winter field.All will be revealed.I am in a winter field.

As the deer’s ‘‘scut’’ flashes up in the form of the ‘‘short erect tail’’between references to the speaker’s self, the Latin meaning ofpenis is ‘‘revealed’’ and its macho possessor mocked.

In view of the interchangeability that he has established amongfox and deer and human, Seidel doesn’t need an antecedent for thepronoun at the beginning of the fourth stanza: ‘‘They really areeverywhere./They crawl around in one’s intimate hair./Theyspread disease and despair./They rape and pillage/In the middleof Sag Harbor Village,’’ the fashionable Long Island resort townwhere he has a home. Animals, people, and bugs – lice, fleas,ticks – have harassed each other forever, and propagated and pros-pered together, and the ambiguity of the term ‘‘venery’’ is as justas it is venerable:

Winter, spring, Baghdad, fall,Venery is written allOver me like a rash,


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Hair and the gash,But also the Lehrer NewsHour and a wood fire and Bach.

The world, alas and hooray, is everything that is the case, in Witt-genstein’s definition, and so it is that the poem can end with theassassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and RobertKennedy and the latter’s quoting, when he announced the death ofKing, of Aeschylus. That quotation (the lines, which concern learn-ing from su√ering, are from the Agamemnon) was impromptu andby heart, and as Seidel concludes with ‘‘American trophies coveredin tears that deck the American halls,’’ the reader might try toimagine its being spoken instead by, say, Alberto Gonzales.

Near the other end of this volume is ‘‘The Bush Administration.’’Perhaps only the Seidel of the ‘‘pink’’ and ‘‘civilized but’’ wouldadopt that title not only to designate the current regime but also tosuggest that regime’s identity with ‘‘the heart of darkness’’ – and tolink passing its policies with Al Qaeda’s pronouncements:

The darkness coming from the mouthMust be the entrance to a cave.The heart of darkness took another formAnd inside is the Congo in the man.I think the Bush Administration is as crazy as Sparta was.Sparta has swallowed Congo and is famished.

In the black hole of Seidel’s history- and geography-crunchingimagination, it is but a phrase or two to ‘‘a drop of rain’’ thatanticipates ‘‘the next Ice Age being born.’’ Once such freedom ofassociation has been permitted, anything can happen on the page,and Seidel’s sleight-of-hand is such that it does – but then it isalready happening in the world he lives in. It is in another poem,‘‘Barbados,’’ that we come across the book’s title phrase, ‘‘Ooga-

Booga,’’ but the unintelligible realm conjured by it is one we areall familiar with, in which the most civilized and pious among us‘‘go native.’’ Even as a ‘‘human being sawing screams God is

Great ’’ as he beheads an American hostage, ‘‘white cannibalsin cowboy boots/return to the bush/And the darkness of thebrutes.’’ Seidel does not mention the computer adventure gameKing’s Quest – in which Ooga Booga, in the country of Eldritch, isa chaotic land of the living dead, wherein ghouls and demons are

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tortured, beheaded, and burned – but he might well have itsevents in mind. In ‘‘The Bush Administration,’’ our ‘‘fellow citizencicadas’’ rise like a plague from underground ‘‘to the tops of thevanished Twin Towers/And float back down white as ashes/Tointroduce a new Ice Age.’’

However unapologetically rich and hedonistic the poet is, he isalso moral and self-damning. If the Bush administration is ‘‘crazy,’’so is he. ‘‘The downpour drumming in my taxi gets the Hutu inme dancing,’’ as he puts it, and with heightened whackiness: ‘‘Ihave never been so cheerily suicidal, so sui-Seidel.’’ This is JohnMilton’s Satan as Lowell adapted him in ‘‘Skunk Hour,’’ his handat his manic throat: ‘‘I myself am hell.’’ That is, ‘‘inside is theCongo in the man,’’ or he is in this mess up to his ‘‘fist-eatinganus.’’ His Ducati epitomizes headlong, materialistic drive: ‘‘Goingfast [the title of an earlier collection] got you nowhere.’’

Not that things have ever been or ever could be essentiallyotherwise, he repeatedly implies. In ‘‘The Death of the Shah,’’ heis himself an avatar of Eliot as we know him in the form ofPrufrock, Tiresias, and the philosopher of ‘‘East Coker’’:

Here I am, not a practical man,But clear-eyed in my contact lenses,Following no doubt a slightly di√erent line than the others,Seeking sexual pleasure above all else,Despairing of art and life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Having traveled not everywhere in sixty-seven years but far,Up the Ei√el Tower and the Leaning Tower of PisaAnd the World Trade Center Twin TowersBefore they fell,Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Accra,Tokyo, Berlin, Tehran under the Shah,Cairo, Bombay, L.A., London. . . .

Visiting Africa, he saw history beneath the skin of the present:

When we drove with our driver on the highways of GhanaTo see for ourselves what the slave trade was,Elmina was Auschwitz.The slaves from the bush were marched to the coast


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And warehoused in dungeons under St. George’s Castle,Then FedEx’ed to their new jobs far away.

One hotel kept a racehorse as a pet.The owner allowed it the run of the property.

Line after observant line deepens the indictment. In anotherpoem, visiting the paradisiacal Caribbean, he sees the futuresuperimposed upon the past:

The most expensive hotel in the worldIs the slave ship unloading Africans on the moon.They wear the opposite of space suits floating o√ the dockTo a sugar mill on a hilltop.They float into the machinery.The machine inside the windmill isn’t vegetarian.A ‘‘lopper’’ lops o√ a limb caughtIn the rollers and the machine has to stop.

Pieter Breughel’s vision will always be contemporary. ‘‘The BigJet’’ ends with this stanza – which, like so many of Seidel’s stanzas,easily survives being cut from its context:

Meat-eating seagulls shout their little cries myanmar

myanmar above the airport,Dropping razor clams on the runway to break them open.Hard is soft inside.The big jet has soft people inside for the ride.

A handy Web site tells me that razor clams get their names fromtheir resemblance in appearance and sharpness to straight razors(it’s hard to believe Seidel didn’t think of the weapons of the 9/11highjackers) and that they are ‘‘fat, sweet and tenderly chewy.’’

The jolting power and resonant depth of many of these poems –others would include ‘‘Bologna,’’ ‘‘Mother Nature,’’ and ‘‘Rilke’’ –embarrass the thinner exercises in Ooga-Booga. Apparently twopoems, ‘‘Nectar’’ and ‘‘The Big Golconda Diamond,’’ depend onthe reader’s being as enchanted as the poet by the same freakishlylarge gem. The flip conclusion of the sonnet-length second ofthese – ‘‘I followed it on my hand across the Pont des Arts/LikeShakespeare in a trance starting the sonnet sequence’’ – calls up

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Billy Collins and reminds us how extraneous the Bard’s own finalcouplets can be; and the beginning of ‘‘What Are Movies For?’’ –‘‘Razzle-dazzle on the surface, wobbled Jell-O sunlight,/A goddessand her buttocks walk across the bridge’’ (ah, that ‘‘and’’!) – evokese. e. cummings and reminds us how close to parody Seidel works.The two owl poems make the book longer. I am afraid that‘‘Grandson Born Dead’’ can be called lugubrious and that ‘‘Death’’is the very lightest verse.

A few of the slighter poems, however, are among the mostmoving. ‘‘White Butterflies’’ opens with what seems a gauzilysentimental recollection of two lovers meeting, only to finish withthe beautifully controlled revelation that the elegy is for the poet’sdog. Another elegy, ‘‘Cloclo,’’ which commemorates the painterClotilde Peploe (1915–97), constructs and even in the course ofdoing so somehow scales a delicate latticework of a√ection andadmiration. It shows more briefly what other poems demonstrateat impressive length: when it comes to structure, by which I meansimply the morphological dimension of a poem comparable to thearchitecture of a building, Seidel is a master of innovative itera-tion and surprising combination. That command of form, takenwith the rich texture of his materials, makes him in my view oneof our most formidable and durable lyric poets.

poetry in review

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