By David Wojahn
The Southern Review

Native Guard: Poems by Natasha Trethewey (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Hoops: Poems by Major Jackson (W. W. Norton & Company)
Sugartown by David Rivard (Graywolf Press)
Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005 by Rodney Jones (Houghton Mifflin Company)

 

In the title poem of his late-in-life collection, History, Robert Lowell writes that "History has to live with what was here— / clutching and close to fumbling all we had." This famously visceral poet refuses to make history an abstraction; it is an august but gangling force, a kind of murky, debris- and detritus-laden river, flowing relentlessly, and in its currents the public and the personal are impossible to distinguish from one another. As Lowell insists in many of his greatest poems—think of the embittered elegy for Colonel Shaw and his black regiment in "For the Union Dead"—selves write history, but history shapes selves in powerfully mysterious ways. This is certainly not a fashionable contention, but I think it is one shared by all of the four poets under discussion here. They are not by any means Lowell's descendants, but they share with him a desire to superimpose the historical upon the personal; and for them the river of history is even more turbid than it was for the aristocratic Lowell, involving above all matters of race and of class, currents which Lowell with his patrician sense of entitlement could not have so acutely identified. Natasha Trethewey and Major Jackson are young African American poets concerned not so much with problems of identity politics as with the challenge of forging an authentic and personal voice in an era when definitions of African American literary identity promise to be significantly reconfigured. David Rivard and Rodney Jones, white male poets in midcareer, differ from many of their generational counterparts in their willingness to overtly acknowledge class as a force that still shapes our lives and continues to foster injustice. The milieu of Trethewey and Jones is primarily the rural South, while for Rivard and Jackson it is the urban Northeast. Trethewey and Jackson favor received forms, often the more intricate varieties, while Jones and Rivard work primarily in free verse—yet it is a tautly controlled and elegantly modulated variety of free verse. However, for all their formal and thematic differences, these four poets struggle with the same question that animated Lowell—how does history "live with what was here"?

Natasha Trethewey, in her third collection, offers the most programmatic answer to this question, and it is one which preoccupied the writer in her previous two volumes, Domestic Work (2001) and Bellocq's Ophelia (2002). There are two notable strains in these collections. One emphasizes the autobiographical lyric and seems little different from the mainstream period style of contemporary poetry as it has existed for the past thirty-odd years; this is not to dismiss her writing in this mode, for much of it is rendered with considerable facility, and it helps that Trethewey's personal history is an interesting one. She is a Mississippian, born of a white father and an African American mother in 1966, when miscegenation laws were still in place. The legacy of a biracial heritage, coupled with the impact of her parents' divorce when the poet was six, informs many of her poems. Trethewey's other signature approach might be termed a documentary one, making use of found materials, ekphrastic poems about photographs, and historical monologues. Bellocq's Ophelia is a book-length study of one of the Storyville District prostitutes photographed by Bellocq in turn of the century New Orleans. The protagonist is a composite of these women, really, and although the portrait of Ophelia that the book renders is skillful, she remains less a character than a type; ultimately this book seems a bit too willful and static. Native Guard represents a considerable advance for Trethewey, in no small measure because the volume manages to entwine the personal and the documentary-historical elements of her first two collections, giving the poems a new sort of urgency and cohesion. And the poems are better written; the formal concision of the earlier volumes, which at times seems merely dutiful, has been replaced by a greater prosodic fluency, especially in the collection's many sonnets, but also in highly demanding forms such as the pantoum and ghazal. Her characteristic concerns now complement one another, with the book's three sections moving seamlessly between personal lyrics—many of them elegies for the poet's mother—and historical meditations and monologues.

The collection revolves around two pilgrimages that the speaker undertakes, each to a vexed bastion of the Old South. Both are in Mississippi. One is Vicksburg, with its battlefield graveyards and antebellum mansions, where the speaker dreams that "the ghost of history lies down beside me /rolls over, pins me beneath her heavy arm." The other is Gulfport, an even more fraught locale for Trethewey, for it is the place where she was born—and also where Jefferson Davis died. Gulfport is the setting of the collection's title sequence, a superbly rendered group of unrhymed sonnets; on Ship Island, off the coast from Gulfport, the Union army stationed one of its first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guard, who served as guards at a compound for Confederate prisoners. The guardsmen's experience is evoked through the monologue of one of their number, a former slave who, because he is literate and the prisoners he guards are often not, spends his days writing letters home for them. This richly ironic dramatic situation allows for considerable narrative breadth; each sonnet purports to be one of the soldier's journal entries, and Trethewey manages to replicate the loftiness and florid mannerism of Victorian diction without allowing the poem to become stilted. The following section serves as a good example:

I listen, put down in ink what I know
they labor to say between silences
too big for words: worry for beloveds—
My Dearest, how are you getting along—
what has become of their small plots ofland—
did you harvest enough food to put by?
They long for the comfort of former lives—
I see you as you were, waving goodbye.
Some send photographs—a likeness in case
the body can't return. Others dictate
harsh facts of this war: The hot air carries
the stench of limbs, rotten in the bone pit.
Flies swarm—a black cloud. We hunger, grow weak.
When men die, we eat their share of hardtack.

Trethewey is clearly a poet who honors the tradition, yet her collection's greatest achievement arises from her willingness to reinterpret and reform her definition of tradition, be it the literary tradition or the hoary received wisdoms of southern culture. Trethewey also understands that toppling this latter tradition's racism and sexism requires great inventiveness, and she undertakes her quest without resorting to predictable strategies. The collection's final section begins with a poem whose conceit suggests that a comic treatment will follow: The speaker dreams she is having her photo taken with the Fugitive poets, but rather than play this situation for its satiric possibilities, the poem ends in decidedly ambivalent fashion, echoing Quentin Compson's all-too-familiar refrain from Absalom, Absalom:

                                 Yes,
I say to the glass of bourbon I'm offered.
We're lining up now—Robert Penn Warren,
his voice just audible above the drone
of bulldozers, telling us where to stand.
Say "race," the photographer croons. I'm in
blackface again when the flash freezes us.
My father's white, I tell them, and rural.
You don't hate the South? they ask. You don't hate it?

The speaker answers this question by attempting to beat the Literary Good Old Boys at their own game, partly through a sequence of elegiac recollections of childhood that grant a grave dignity to her southern upbringing, even as they detail racial taunts, a history class in which students are asked to sit through multiple screenings of Gone with the Wind, and the Klan burning a cross on her family's lawn. (This latter poem—a villanelle—is also a considerable technical tour de force.) But the collection's most forceful response to the questions put forth by the Fugitive Dream Chorus comes in "Elegy for the Native Guards," a kind of coda to the book's title poem. It chronicles a visit to the Gulfport historical site where the Native Guard brigades were stationed, although the speaker discovers that their presence there has not been memorialized. Like Lowell in his majestic elegy for Colonel Shaw and his black soldiers, the poem manages to begrudgingly honor Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead" while at the same time savaging the matter-of-fact racism and languid gothicism of that poem, whose sensibility lives on in a park ranger who "shows us casemates, cannons" and "a store that sells / souvenirs, tokens of history long buried." Trethewey quotes from "Ode" in her epigraph, and borrows some of its grave iambic music. But this is where the similarity ends. Trethewey's closing stanzas are masterful:

The Daughters of the Confederacy
has placed a plaque here, at the fort's entrance—
each Confederate soldier's name raised hard
in bronze; no names carved for the Native Guards—
2nd Regiment, Union Men, black phalanx.
What is monument to their legacy?

All the grave markers, all the crude headstones—
water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones,
and we listen for what the waves intone.
Only the fort remains, near forty feet high,
round, unfinished, half open to the sky,
the elements—wind, rain—God's deliberate eye.

Surely there are readers who will find these lines a bit turgid, their music and rhetoric recalling "Elegy in an English Churchyard"—as though Modernism never happened. Yet Trethewey, indifferent as she seems to be to aesthetic party lines and the dictates of mere poetic fashion, would doubtless counter that such concerns are parochial. And I think she would be right.

Major Jackson is another young African American writer who has with his new collection embraced a thoroughly unfashionable style. Hoops is a puzzling and eccentric volume, maddening at times in its digressive self-indulgence but always brilliantly readable. And, in contrast to the exemplary cohesion of Jackson's first collection, Leaving Saturn (2002), Hoops is something of a loose, baggy monster of a book; its title poem is a revised and expanded version of a poem included in Leaving Saturn, and it also includes a number of additional sections of "Urban Renewal," the effort that served as the opening sequence of the earlier book. Hoops, therefore, seems less an individual collection than an ongoing installment of some larger project. This project seems now to include a long poem that serves as the book's centerpiece, the sixty-page "Letter to Brooks," a sprawling discursive piece written in, of all things, rime royal. As Jackson reminds us at one point in the poem, it's the stanza employed in Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron." The form gives him the opportunity to rhyme "desk" with "Audenesque" and offer up Audenesque chatter, allusion-mongering, wit, and name-dropping. It also permits Jackson to undertake what amounts to a book-length mash note to his first poetic love, Gwendolyn Brooks. It's the early—and often Audenesque—poetry of Brooks which Jackson loves, the elegance and narrative complexity of A Street in Bronzeville and particularly Annie Allen, a book that also contains lengthy passages in a variation on rime royal. I've spoken in some detail about "Letter's" prosodic pedigree because this sort of thing seems to be a matter of crucial importance to Jackson. Whereas Leaving Saturn was concerned with the Bildungsroman narrative, which drives many a first collection of poetry—in Jackson's case with gritty portraits and narratives of growing up in Philadelphia—Hoops is all about learning your chops; it's about technique more than content. Leaving Saturn was an exemplary first collection, and I suppose in a more problematic way Hoops is an exemplary second book. Interestingly enough, the contrast I speak of is no better described than by Stanley Kunitz in a 1950 review of Brooks's Annie Allen:

Like many second books, this is an uneven one. In his (sic) first book, as a rule, the poet exults in his discovery that he can fly; in his second book he tests his speed and his range and possibly even begins his examination of his theory of flight...

Jackson tries all of these things, too, some more successfully than others. The strongest efforts in the new collection remain the sort of autobiographical narratives Jackson perfected in Leaving Saturn. Hoops's title poem falls into this category, as does "Selling Out," which opens the collection. Here the adolescent speaker and a friend, fresh from working a shift at McDonald's, attempt to score some drugs; they're way out of their league, however:

We wore Gazelles, matching sheepskins,
and the ushanka, miles from Leningrad.
Chris said, Let's cop some blow despite
my schoolboy jitters. A loose spread
of dealers preserved corners. Then a kid,
large for the chrome Huffy he pedaled,
said he had the white stuff and led us
to an alley fronted by an iron gate on
a gentrified street edging Northern Liberties.
I turned to tell Chris how the night
air dissolved like soil, how jangling
keys made my neck itch, how maybe
this wasn't so good an idea, when
the cold opening of gun-barrel
steel poked my head, and Chris's eyes
widened like two water spills before
he bound away to a future of headphones
and release parties. Me? The afterlife?
Had I ever welcomed back the old
neighborhood? Might a longing
persistent as the seedcorn maggot
tunnel through me? All I know:
a single dog barked his own vapor,
an emptiness echoed through blasted
shells of rowhomes rising above,
and I heard deliverance in the bare
branches fingering a series of powerlines
in silhouette to the moon's hushed
excursion across the battered fields
of our lives, that endless night
of ricocheting fear and shame....

The effortless tetrameter, the shift from the narrative of the mugging to the lyric introspection of the later lines—it's all handled with great panache. Jackson surely has proven that he can fly, that he has the "speed and range."

"Letter to Brooks," however, is mostly "theory of flight." As the ending of "Sellling Out" suggests, Jackson has a weakness for elaborately worked-over metaphors and conceits, and a penchant for show-stopping rhetoric. "Letter to Brooks" has all this in abundance, sometimes to the poem's detriment, for it frequently turns into digression and beside-the-point editorializing on culture—high and low—and (especially) poetry. Like Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron," the poem is given some structural cohesion through its epistolary conceit: Jackson's aim is to guide his illustrious forebear through contemporary America, but he doesn't follow a carefully plotted itinerary. We glimpse the poet on his travels to reading gigs, writers' colonies, and even that most unpoetic of destinations, the AWP convention. And we get rhymes on the order of "Derrida" and "DVD," "get our fill" and "Cypress Hill." Here's a fairly representative stanza:

Art as ritual, said again and again,
          Most recently by DJ Spooky,
Who cites the sound collage as transcendent
          Rite building a nation, our esprit
          De corps. Hip-hop's current genius loci
Believes the cut, scratch, and spin
Amends heteroglossia & situates Bakhtin.

It helps that Jackson employs all of these strategies with a fair amount of earnestness, displaying a self-deprecating humor that is quite different from the self-congratulatory wit that often mars Auden's "Lord Byron." And the poem is not all about networking; there are, for example, some touching passages devoted to the poet's young son, and for all the with-it references in the poem, Jackson comes across as endearingly square. He makes it clear to us that his sympathies are not with the avant-garde. He slams the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and, for that matter, slams Slams. In a fairly lengthy appraisal of the era of the Black Arts movement, he sides with Robert Hayden over Amiri Baraka, and he of course favors Brooks's early formalist work over the sloganeering free verse of her later career. This is not to say that Jackson secretly watches the Fox network or subscribes to The New Criterion. Jackson, like Trethewey, is in search of a personal canon and a self-defining style, one that is not hobbled by doctrinaire approaches to ideologies or aesthetics. "Letter to Brooks," for all its eccentricity and sometimes misplaced ambition, can be seen as a step toward realizing this goal. Jackson is clearly a significant talent, and his accomplishment may prove to be considerable.  

David Rivard's fourth collection, Sugartown, like Jackson's "Letter to Brooks," is a sustained examination of what used to be called "the American scene." His approach, however, is minimalist rather than maximalist: He favors short lines, a telegraphic approach to syntax, and metaphors too restless to extend themselves into conceits. Yet thanks to Rivard's jittery associative talents and the sternness of his scrutiny—both of the world and of the self—he possesses a breadth and authority that the maximalists among us would have to envy. We hear echoes of Robert Creeley and George Oppen in the poems, not only of their idiosyncratic approach to syntax, but also of Oppen's troubled social consciousness and Creeeley's wry self-appraisals and sudden shifts in diction. We also sense the presence of the East Europeans, particularly Zbigniew Herbert and Adam Zagajewski.

This list says something about Rivard's ambitions and his standards; they're not easy writers to emulate; they share a concern for how consciousness unfolds, but they are not interested in merely charting the white noise of experience in the manner of John Ashbery and his followers. And they are all in their own way—even Creeley—decidedly political writers, concerned above all with those sudden collisions between self and world, between introspection and conscience. These writers have bestowed upon Rivard an almost paradoxical desire to move toward graven-ness and epigram on the one hand, and improvisational relentlessness on the other. Rivard favors what Oppen calls "a poetry of statement /... at close quarters." He formulates contentions only so that he can put them to the test. The tone of the poems, even when they incorporate humor, is always deeply self-conscious and edgy. This is even suggested by the title of the effort I quote from here, "We Either Do or Don't, But the Problem Evolves Anyway":

It isn't that hard, they say.

It doesn't amount to more than an ache, really.

Give yourself some space, they say—

as if the self were a cozy little back room, a small hall
strung with incandescent streamers,

and all that needed to be done, all that was ever required,
was to tear a few down.

But the problem is, friends,
           the problem is
there are a great many top-of-the-line things
that each & everyone of us
has gone around saying we'd die for,

items of an apparently
absolute power

and perfection, in a variety of impenetrable styles—

"That's a color hair I'd die for," she says,
          speaking sometime in the afterglow of a dark haircut
                    flickering by,

a bleak thing to say,

but so human, so sadly & completely full of the silliness
of wanting

that for once it sends
all the clarity suspended in the chlorinated sunlight
straight over the edge—

it haywires the clouds with lightning,
and the inscrutable sluices flood.

And what do you do then?

The passage gives some sense of Rivard's method, his float-like-a butterfly-but-sting-like-a-bee approach. The statements and rhetorical questions rain down with an almost pugilistic relentlessness, with dizzying but methodical thrusts and parries. Rivard's interrogation of contemporary jargon, of advertising lingo perverted into a parody of self-examination, puts him in league with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. But where those poets theorize, Rivard rages. He spits out his rhetorical questions with a kind of prophetic alarm. Rivard can't always sustain this level of truculent intensity— I've quoted from the first half of a poem that bogs down in its final stanzas— but when this poet is at his frequent best, his technique is flawless.

Rivard has been working in this manner for some twenty years now, and its dangers have less to do with craft than with character: Rivard's Larkinesque sternness, both toward the self and toward the culture in which he dwells, has in the past threatened to devolve into self-laceration and misanthropy. Sugartown is Rivard's best book because he has replaced this tendency with— in places, but they're all the right ones—something like tenderness. He is still capable of acute and withering satire, as when he describes the crowd at a ritzy arts benefit as "professional white folk /under glass: / suited bipolar disorders / with compelling hairstyles & clout / being served by / 'people of color.'" But this sort of writing is leavened by passages of lyrical but unsentimental wonder. These are not emotions the poet feels particularly comfortable with: One of the poems, tellingly, is entitled "Acceptance?" and question marks are implicit in many others. Yet it is precisely this tentativeness, this suspicion on the writer's part that his grim postulates and cold self-appraisals have become Pavlovian, that gives Rivard's new poems their resonance.

A poem set at a children's birthday party starts with a description of the parents' boredom and discomfort, rails at the benumbingly consumerist gifts which the birthday child receives, and even complains about the "spendthrift sweetness" of the children themselves. But after a page or so Rivard arrives at an exquisite and hard-won conclusion:

                              Amir, Sara, Simone, Nina,
                                Lily, William, Amy & Olivia, here

for Simone's sixth birthday;

                                                  "Help me," Sara will say,
                              later, wanting a Band-Aid,
                     holding up a finger that won't be bleeding—

          "help me"
          the story often enough
          arrived at,

                         told, or not told—
"we look almost happy out in the sun," Transtromer says,
"while we bleed to death from wounds we know nothing about."

                    And the clouded spot
                    on the windowpane
                    is the oil & sweat
                    left by the forehead
                    of someone real.

There is no writer at work today quite like Rivard. He's strong medicine, certainly, but his peculiar intensity and refusal to harbor delusion during a time when other writers of his generation seem more interested in shtick and posturing make his writing seem all the more necessary.

Rodney Jones is as garrulous as Rivard is tight-lipped, but the two writers share several qualities, not least of which are an abiding moral seriousness, and a baffled dismay about the mess in which contemporary Americans have found themselves—an America where, as Jones laments in one of his recent poems, "we ask / which most cogently represents us / Leaves of Grass or The Simpsons" and where "there is the idea that every / living thing is a subset of human / control." Like James Wright in his later work—and Wright, along with C. K. Williams, has been one of Jones's most enduring influences—he likes to play the raconteur, and his comic timing can be flawless. And yet, like all true comedians, his vision is ultimately a tragic one. Salvation Blues, the title of Jones's career-spanning collection, suggests a stance of comic paradox, but comedy for Jones always morphs into something more desperate. He's interested in salvation as José Ortega y Gassett defined it, as "an idea of the shipwrecked"; and I imagine that Jones would agree with this contention.

The form Jones has evolved to suit this approach is a line of sometimes unngainly length—up to twenty syllables in places. It serves his purposes well; the strong iambic underpinnings give even his most sprawling lines some rhythmic force, while at the same time accommodating his concerns for narrative and anecdote. It's also a line that's apt to violate a number of free verse prosodic taboos, for it is likely to be laden with adverbs, adjectives, and a good many of the Big Abstractions. And Jones's narratives are rarely linear; they come in the form of rambling periodic sentences packed with digressions, biting asides, and sudden tonal shifts. The opening stanzas of "Contempt," a recollection of a dead-end, white collar job, constitute a good showcase of Jones's style:

"Lizards," he'd say, dispensing with local men, and then resheath his    pen and huff back to his drafting table,
A fiber board pristined with vinyl and overhung with the ambiguous    linked appendages of maybe a dozen modular lights,
One of which, by some unconscionable kink of logic, he'd bring    screeching down above
His latest renderings of nun-like, mestiza hens I'd named like missiles:    the Star 5000, the T-100 Egg Machine,

Those days of fruitless scratching on a pad, those nights of Klee and    Rilke, and what abortifacient labor
Leaves, instead of money, that sense of energy troweled out and    slapped up, no more than a phrase of two
That sticks, a sketch, no novel, no painting, only time whining    irrevocably, and the feeling
of events put off or missed....

Satirical, yes, but the satire derives from something other than postmodern irony. Some of it seems to come from a childhood spent in rural Alabama, a place the speaker can't completely detest, given that one of his longest and finest poems is entitled "Elegy for the Southern Drawl" and another called "Small Lower Class Southern White Male," scathing as it may be, amounts to a kind of involuntary self-portrait. Jones's stance arises not so much from white-liberal guilt or confessions along the lines of, "I don’t know what to say either. Eeether / eyether..." It's instead a kind of bafflement, a near-Chekhovian amazement at human folly and hypocrisy. A poem devoted to the arrival of television in the Alabama of Jones's childhood sounds a bit like a passage from Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude; the tone emphasizes the sheer strangeness of the event rather than its sociology:

                     Suddenly some
Of them in the next valley had one.
You would know them by their lights

Burning late at night, and the recentness
And distance of events entering their talk,
But not one in our valley; for a long time
No one had one, so when the first one

Arrived in the van from the furniture store
And the men had set the box on the lawn,
At first we stood back from it, circling it
As they raised its antenna and staked in

The guy wires before taking it in the door
And I seem to recall a kind of blue light
Flickering from inside and then a woman
Calling out that they had got it tuned in—

A little fuzzy, a ghost picture, but something
That would stay with us, the way we hurried
Down the dirt road, the stars, the silence,
Then everyone disappearing into the houses.

As in so many of Jones's poems, the comic virtues of this scene do not detract from Jones's essential wariness, his outsider's skepticism. Troubled as he may be by his "roots," he is also troubled by the rigidities of anything that looks like convention, and he is just as apt to focus on the absurdities of academic life as he is on an upbringing in the Bible Belt. And, because Jones is ultimately a moralist—or perhaps it's better to label him a comic moralist—it is not surprising that so many of his poems are variants upon the ars poetica, bearing titles such as "A Defense of Poetry," "The Poetry Reading," "The Work of Poets," and "Moment of Whitman." Poetry, for Jones, is one of the few human endeavors that are resistant to debasement. But not wholly resistant, as an acrid portrait of an elder poet teacher attests: "The great man, head like a cauliflower, addressed our poems / Thursday mornings, pontificating between coughing jags." The piece ends with a chilling exchange:

He liked my poems best. Not much. I asked one other thing:
"After all those years and books, what do you think of poetry?"

"I loathe and detest if."

Avoiding this fate is no easy matter if you possess Jones's inclination toward dyspepsia and his disdain for many of the received pieties of current poetic discourse. And yet in "The Poetry Reading," after a page and a half of lampooning the vaudevillian silliness of campus poetry readings, Jones concludes with a passage of Horatian simplicity and directness:

After all, not much happens in this lounge
Or small auditorium under the library,
And yet those who are here hear, don't they,
Among the lubricated delicacies for the auditory senses,
A thing that is right and singular to the heart?
Oh it does not always have to issue from guilt
Or some lingering inferiority to the British.
It can be done plainly or in elaborate meters.
Afterward, someone still unheard from
May actually go into a room alone and read it.

This tyro reader opening a book of poetry would be fortunate indeed if that book were Salvation Blues, and it is a collection which, in a just world, would win all of the major awards. Literary fashion may be too fickle to allow for this, but Jones, like Rivard, Trethewey, and Jackson, is one of a small number of figures at work today who play for high stakes, who are immune to triviality and invite important reckonings. In short, they remind us what is has been like "to live with what was here."

 

About the Author
David Wojahn's most recent collection is Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems (2006). He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College.

The Southern Review
Louisiana State University

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