There’s been much blog ado over The New Yorker’s “Summer Fiction: 20 Under 40.” Check out the gnashing here, here and here (we promise to complain more in a later post). However the writers learned their craft, they learned to write first sentences well. In fact, we found the lead sentence to be the best part of most of the stories. Clue to craft: Those with the least interesting first sentences tended to be the least interesting stories. As a service to our readers, we’ve taken the first sentence of each of the eight stories and put them together in no particular order, to make a free-association poem of a quality no more dubious than the stories themselves.–Cabbage Rabbit

Max had a name for what had happened to his son: the Accident.

The boy and his twin brother grew up on the streets of Northside,

down in the little choke valley, befouled by industry,

between university hill to the southeast and the neighborhood to the north,

College Hill, which had no college, despite its name,

only modest white houses hinting at the white suburbs to come.

The boy wore a black parka, a matching ski cap, bluejeans, and sneakers;

he appeared to be five years old; and he was weeping.

He hadn’t heard from Kate Lotvelt in two weeks. Early yet, the morning clouds,

the color of silver fox,

and Lazarus was running. Lucky diary! Undeserving diary!

People say no one reads anymore, but I find that’s not the case.

Old men deserve  memory. Philip Levine has a good one and he knows how to put it to use. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, at 83, still finds his past to be fertile, as he has for some 50 years. But there’s something new in News of the World as well. Yes, Levine is still providing “a voice for the voiceless,” and getting inspiration from his days working in Detroit auto plants. But News seems wider in its perspective, softer in its anger and more direct in its language, just the things we might all hope for in our aged expressions.

Levine has always written from memory. Consider “Belle Isle, 1949″ written almost 25 years after he and friends ran down into the Detroit River/to baptize ourselves in the brine/of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles/melted snow. The poem, a swimming out into peaceful darkness with a Polish high school girl/I’d never seen before and a return guided by harsh industrial light, takes one to the source of Levine’s work on its final line: to go back where we came from.

In “Innocence,” he returns to 1944 and his brother, stationed in London where he services B-24s. Immediately, the poem jumps ahead 50 years to a man who remembers, as a boy, hearing the planes taking off at dusk to level/the industrial cities of the Ruhr and then to his brother, now blind and glad to be alive, whose memory, precise–like a diamond– differs on the number of the dead.  It’s as if time, though not healing the wound, has lessened the giving of its injury.

Levine’s brother figures in a handful of these poems, serving  as a measure of the once and future. In 1945, he and his brother, awakened early by the younger brother’s dream-induced cry, go early into the fields at the edge of town to find small treasures of nature. They talk of the years ahead: the future coming/ toward us in the elm’s black shadow,/two brother–almost one man–/held together by what we can’t share.

Levine’s kinder look at the past even extends to Henry Ford, seeing him middle-aged, bored and joining his workers, “his beloved colored and Yids,” at the night shift time clock. The sympathy towards “the man who created/ the modern world comes from Ford’s realization that he has remade the world in his image, dark and starless.

Even basic human emotion is tied to working class memory. In “Of Love and Other Disasters” a divorced assembler meets a woman in a bar who is all wrong, way too skinny.  But there are other attractions, symbols of her life  as a punch press operator: she couldn’t get/her hands right, how the grease ate/so deeply into her skin it became/a part of her. He tries to find the lifeline in her palm and can’t. She cleans something, delicately, from his cheekbone. He thought, “Better/get out of here before it’s too late,” but/suspected too late was what he wanted.

If anything, Levine, a poet known for his use of common language,  is even more plain-spoken here. What disappointment is found in the volume comes from the infrequent use of the expected, cliched phrases that register before reading rather than registering surprise after. The even pacing of his phrases, despite often unpredictable line breaks, makes for a sort of music, more folk than formal, more ballad than be-bop. His narrative skills, built from memory, are as good as ever, and most of the poems here (unlike his earlier work) can be read as simple stories without attaching anything to their symbolic weight. The narrative function carries over especially well into the prose poems that make up the book’s third section.

The collection’s last poem, “Magic,” embraces everything that came before it: memory, class consciousness, cross-cultural coexistence, the importance attached to the future and its promise, the disappointment in realizing nothing changes. It carries stories inside stories, a nod to the jazz that reflected its time and, most importantly, the realization to regard myself as no part/of a great scheme that included everything. The poem closes with advice to the rest of us, disappointing only in its dependence on its lead cliche, on how to survive four score years and more: I had to put one foot in front of another,/both arms out for balance, stare ahead,/breathe like a beginner, and hope to arrive.–Cabbage Rabbit

Not to be forgotten in any consideration of Raymond Carver is his poetry.  Mostly written in the last ten sober years of his life, the poems support the notion of the self-absorbed Carver that Carol Sklenicka’s recent biography suggests. Never one to admire poets dependent on “I” as subject for each and every poem, I still admire Carver for his simplicity, his ability to develop familiar things into metaphor and a certain type of insight that, self-obsessed as it seems, sees our mortality, our history and our hopes as all the same thing. His “I” becomes us.

Carver was expert at making something out of commonly-shared experience. In “Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying To Get Back In,” he makes it easy: You simply go out and shut the door/without thinking. And when you look back/at what you’ve done/it’s too late. If this sounds/like the story of a life, okay. If Carver had stopped there, fine (call it the Lish-like edit). But he goes on for another 40, mostly indulgent line to strengthen the image even as he weakens its effect. “I brought my face close to the glass/and imagined myself inside/sitting at my desk.

Still, it’s not so easy to dismiss those 40 lines. Carver talks about the personalization of his writing, how his work is a window on his past and his  shame at “the injury I’d done back then.” Maybe he could have done it in 20 lines and with less self-indulgence: This was the window on the other side/of the desk where I’d raise my eye/and stare out when I sat at that desk. And gotten right to the poem’s conclusion: I bashed that beautiful window.

In her introduction to Carver’s  All of Us: The Collected Poems (good luck finding a copy),  second-wife and poet Tess Gallagher finds virtue in Carver’s simplicity, seemingly making an argument that poetry shouldn’t be demanding: “Who wouldn’t be disarmed by poetry which requires so much less of us than it unstintingly gives?” Much of this ease which readers find in Carver’s poetry comes from personal involvement. He doesn’t stand apart as “I” but turns the reader into that same self. One can’t help but think of Carver’s relationship to Lish when Gallagher says that Carver’s “transparency” might insult some weightier thinkers who “would have applied an editor like a tourniquet.”  She goes on to explain,: “Overreach was natural and necessary to him, and to fault him for it would be like spanking a cat for swallowing a goldfish.”

Still, it’s all about him. Carver’s ability to take an innocent walk and dredge up personal history is unparalleled. In “This Morning” from Ultramarine, the poet strolls out determined not to return/until I took in what Nature had to offer. Despite the distractions of fresh snow, blue sky and sea and wheeling gulls, as usual, my thoughts/began to wander until he’s thinking about how I should treat/with my former wife. All the things/ I hoped would go away this morning./ The stuff I live with every day. One can almost hear the pop-psychologists yelling at him to get over it.

But he never does. His last and perhaps best known poem, “Late Fragment” opens with a question to the reader before turning back to himself. It’s last two lines seem to reveal the source of his self-obsession: To call myself beloved, to feel myself/beloved on the earth.–Cabbage Rabbit

Louise Gluck’s 11th volume of poetry is a litany of contrasts and their affect the human condition: mountain and meadow, fog and light, village and city. The poems are pinned to the cycles of light and dark, sun and moon, soul and body. When she makes a conclusion, she finds one no better than the other. Take the city-country mouse split between rural and urban life.  “Pastoral” opens with the sun rising over mountains and the mist that hide it.  …but the sun’s behind it always/and the mist isn’t equal to it./ The sun burns its way through, giving the poem a tapestry of images all contained in one grand view.

She goes on to bring the view into perspective.  No one really understands/the savagery of this place,/the way it kills people for no reason,/just to keep in practice.//So people flee–and for a while, away from here,/they’re exuberant, surrounded by so many choices–

But urban life, and its choices, make for hard measure: When they come back, they’re worse./They think they failed in the city, not that the city doesn’t make good its promises. What to blame for this failure? Upbringing and loss of youth, a certain destiny of place shared with their fathers. Gluck places her reason in the middle of the two. …no signal from earth/will ever reach the sun. Thrash/against the fact, you are lost.

As the vehicle of relevation, the sun breaks mist to reveal/the immense mountain. The moon, as revealed in the title poem, is meaningless but full of messages and its reflected sunlight also brings relevation: It’s dead, it’s always been dead,/but it pretends to be something else,/burning like a star, and convincingly, so that you feel sometimes/it could actually make something grow on earth. So that the reader makes no mistake, she defines her image in the following, single-line stanza: If there’s an image of the soul, I think that’s what it is.

If this seems a bleak vision, it is. Gluck offers only small solace, that of growing thing for ourselves, children or lettuces. In “Village Takes,” she gathers firewood and prepares against the darkness that will overtake her. If there is a natural way to deal with this darkness, this mortality, it is in seeing behind things, seeing through darkness “which result from deprivation”,  as bats do. The poem of that name scolds, man the ego, man imprisoned in the eye,/there is a path you cannont see, beyond the eye’s reach and suggests to make a place for light/the mystic shuts his eyes–illumination/of the kind he seeks destroys…

“Earthworm” also operates to advantage in darkness and extols it. …to walk on top of a thing is not to prevail over it–/it is more the opposite, a disguised dependency. Throughout this collection, Gluck tears at certainties, suggesting the enlightened position is not one of light. The worm asks: What is your word? Infinity meaning/that which cannot be measured.

By placing  her title poem at the end of this collection, Gluck has plenty of space to develop her themes and symbols before  drawing them together, thus bringing added weight to those two-and-a-half pages that seem to contain all that came before. Her consistency of image, even as the images develop layer upon layer of meaning, is impressive, and their frequent use in these 41 poems, without tedium, speaks to her skill. Even when they don’t appear in the culminating final poem, her  metaphors develop a single impression. Stealing, burning leaves, cleaning clothes and other simple acts mark passage. The world, as it is,  is framed through windows. As the poet ages, she develops feeling for her body as hse had for the bodies of others. She writes in “Crossroads, “now that we will not be traveling together much long/I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,/like what I remember of love when I was young–.

Gluck use description and explanation in equal and equally effective manner. Her language is matter of fact, it cadences and musical qualities striking with visual and aural sense: To me, it’s safe. The sun rises; the mist/dissipates to reveal/the immense mountain. You can see the peak,/ how white it is, even in summer. And the sky’s so blue… In reminding us of the simplicity of her village, the place where her life is sheltered, she reminds us of the complications of life. We wish we were able to see them as purely, as calmly, as deeply as she.–Cabbage Rabbit

John Ashbery, now 82, has said that his goal is “to produce a poem that the critic can’t even talk about.” Planisphere proves that he keeps trying, even as the critics keep talking. Helen Vendler finds meaning in Planisphere’s title. She notes that it comes from Marvell’s poem “The Definition of Love,” sees that the book is dedicated to Ashbery’s long-time partner, and claims that its two-dimensional suggestion somehow makes it so that “the distant poles at last can touch.” Call it Ashbery’s flat-earth theory, a bit of stretching that, we guess, would surely make Ashbery smile.

Stretching is what Ashbery’s poetry is all about. Never about one thing–though it’s been suggested that it’s about nothing–his poetry, crafted in many ways, is about many things. A single stanza can slip ideas, in the form of symbols stuffed with meaning, like a shoplifter past the checkout of the reader’s attention: “What are the flurries, faked orgasms,/the glass texture? The spa, corrupt,/dead like a geranium/in the crosshairs at the end of time…”

We don’t understand these 99, alphabetically ordered poems the way we usually understand poetry; no “aha” moments as Ashbery calls them. Instead, they resonate with something undefinable, their audible music supplanted by some form of abstraction that seeks an identity in what we can identify. Some of what we discover is familiar, phrases we’ve seen or heard. There’s parents “raising their voices,” “sticker shock” is suffered, “virtuous men…refusing to take sides” and times “Like old times”; the kinds of phraseology that would be damned as cliche used by other writers. But Ashbery puts platitude to unexpected use in unexpected places. Or he wrings something out of them, saying, for example, “There were two ways about it,” the missing “no” bringing “you and me” as well as sun and stars and hope and futility together. This is an old Ashbery trick, keeping his ear to the ground and hearing a stampede. He does the same thing with individual words, turning nouns into verbs, adjectives into nouns and pronouns into other pronouns.

What Ashbery’s done is invented a new use for language, a new way to communicate. Words sweat from working overtime. He pulls sound and symbol from them as well as layers of meaning, like  onion skins, at a pace to leave us crying. The audible music of his phrasing often calls up visual images. In “Semi-Detached” we hear, “when I pause at the door,/pretending to stalk someone through the potted/palms, fizzle or peter or poop out.” The visible fizzle of those palm fronds, stalk and all, have been tied to the previous “popular” and “‘poise’” and “pause,” their vowels ringing against “I’m outta here.”

All this turning and twisting and cleverness for the sake of obscurity has its reason. The poems, even at their least understandable, resonant like new music and free jazz with something we can’t quite put our intellect on. It’s common to hear fans of the avant garde say the more they hear, say Cecil Taylor or Evan Parker or Muhal Richards Abrams, the more they understand their music, what they’re trying to say. It’s a bit different with Ashbery. The more I read these poems, the more I enjoy them. But understand them? No.

So what’s his message? Generally, something like a country song written by Bad Blake, the Jeff Bridges character in the movie Crazy Heart: “Everything is screwed up.”  At end there’s futility, death and “trash.” In the meantime, there’s the musical “sweet communion of sun/and fun” and he’s not talking about a day at the beach… even though he is.

The second and last stanza of “Semi-Detached,” a poem in which he describes himself as “Sanctimonious fraud,” “Pharisee,” “mealymouth, poseur” and worse, seems to sum it up in typical Ashbery style:

When someone calls me by name it’s always

a case of mistaken identity, a ringer.

On the other hand would I have waited while

the contretemps was sorted out? Not likely.

So it’s off to the circus for us, you and me.

You’ll never be more agitated than you are now,

at this insurpassable moment. I, on the other hand

am cool for the time being. Such is my creed.

Where reviewer Vendler, probably correctly, sees a flat-earth theory in “Planisphere” where the opposite poles of Ashbery and his companion finally align, the title poem is about something more than love (but about love as well), a memoir of how the earth can move from something other than sex, how travel through one’s life can be interrupted. It’s set obscurely on a train in the Shinjuku section of Tokyo and recalls “that fatal day in 1861/when the walkways fell off the mountains…”What was launched from this, when “The land stretched away like jelly into a confused cleft” was something personal and larger, the rise of imperialistic Japan. In a personal sense, something else was flattened. But trying to make sense of it all is something like “herding fleas till the next shipment of analgesics arrived.” Ashbery might not stop us from talking. But he’s left us not knowing what to talk about.–Cabbage Rabbit

Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets told of the struggles of some 50 of his contemporary 18th-century English versifiers, John Milton, Alexander Pope and John Dryden among them. Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets is the brutally-comic tale of aspiring contemporary poet, laid-off business reporter and family man Matthew Prior. Walter’s novel is a twist on the familiar story in which a man unsatisfied with the American dream turns to drugs, drink, women or all three in an attempt to find some meaning, thereby risking his home, family and whatever respectability he may have earned. In Walter’s novel, the American dream goes sour, forcing Matthew into the drug subculture in an attempt to salvage what remains of his life.

Prior’s not totally innocent and makes at least one bad choice along the way, if, that is, you think dealing weed to keep your family fed and housed is a bad choice. Circumstances that have become familiar fodder in the last year or so—falling home values, job loss, foreclosure—all catch up with him at once. Was it so bad that Prior and his wife pursued their dream home, even if the neighborhood public school wasn’t the greatest? Was it wrong to bring his memory-challenged father, recent victim of a stripper named Charity, into his happy home? Can he be blamed for chucking a successful journalism career to go into business on his own with the dot-com,  financial-info-in-free-verse site poetfolio.com?  Okay, maybe that last bit doesn’t seem wise.

Walter has strung together a litany of problems pulled right from the headlines—including the decline of newspapers–to befuddle our hero. The results are predictable. His children begin to pull away. Likewise his wife, who spends all her time upstairs on her computer, carrying on a flirtation with a guy from the local lumber yard. His mortgage holder seems to ignore his attempts at contact, shuffling him off to more and more distant realms of automated phone land.

So where does Prior find the promise of rescue from his troubles? Why late night at the local 7/11, of course. There, where milk costs “like nine dollars a gallon,”  he runs into a couple of pot-head, wannabe bangers named Skeet and Jamie. Next thing we know, our man is sucking down some Frankensteined herb and giving his new comrades a ride to a less-than-exciting party.

If the results are predictable and the book’s conclusion anti-climactic in its optimistic stoicism, at least the way through is full of unpredictable, comic surprises. Walter has given us a vivid, sensitive character who, through circumstance, is forced into his bad decisions. In the beginning, Walter seems to say that modern life is stacked against us so why not take a chance? His answer? That kind of gamble plays against a stacked deck.

Walter introduces a host of themes to his tale, ranging from fidelity to financial corruption. Early on, we think that Walter is suggesting, as we believed back in the ’60s, that there’s hope in dope as he and his middle-age acquaintances realize how much now-desperately-needed soothing the evil weed once brought them. Ultimately, this is a book about the consequences of sleep deprivation.

Walter’s  great at finding the small, everyday truths in our lives, including the ironies in encouraging our children to always make “good choices” and the observation that men create “a delusional list of women who secretly long to sleep” with them, no matter how absurd the pairing.

Beneath the surface of Walter’s tale lurks the relationship of art to our day-to-day to survival. Poetry. like weed, provides solace, as well as a step-back way to consider life. Matthew’s poetry—nearly every chapter starts with a poem of some sort—is a mixed, mostly comic bag, ranging from decent image building (“And I wonder if we don’t live like water/seeking a level/a low bed/until one day we just go dry” or “the Fabric of America/would be just fine/if there was a little bit more of it/in our mothers’ underpants.”) to mimed indulgence (“Whose wood this is I think I know”). Some of it embraces haiku and other form.  Much of it serves to move the plot (“How much capital does a consortium need/(I’ve got four hundred in the bank)/To buy four million dollars in weed?”).

The best images can be found in Walter’s prose, as when the lumber dumped in his front yard reminds him of the building block game Jenga and its teetering conclusion. He’s also good at finding the clichés of modern life and stringing them together in despondent litanies: “It’s as if the whole country believes we’ve done something to deserve this collapse, this global warming and endless war, this pile of shit we’re in. We’ve lived beyond our means, spent the future, sapped resources, lived on the bubble.”

The book’s most troubling image doesn’t appear in the text but on the cover: a man falling from the sky. This terrible visual carries a poignant suggestion of 9/11 (echoed in the book’s constant references to 7/11) that seems much too serious for this comic drama. There’s been too much of this in recent years, the image exploited in everything from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close to the opening credits for Mad Men. The Rabbit, who lives in a hole, wants everyone standing on solid ground.–Cabbage Rabbit

I have with me/all that I do not know/I have lost none of it

W.S Merwin “The Nomad Flute” from The Shadow of Sirius

Sometime in the mid 1960s, W. S. Merwin completely lost faith in punctuation and came to believe in his readers. The transformation didn’t happen all at once. The change manifested in his 1963 book The Moving Target, and completed in his sixth book The Lice. Only one of its poems uses periods (and not a single comma) and its phrasing, like the other poems in the book, was so true that it seemed that he’d simply forgotten to take them out.

All these years later, readers don’t even notice the lack of punctuation. Doing what he does with phrases crafted across lines that are paced by climax rhythms, stanza breaks and an occasional well-placed “I” (he also no longer capitalizes the first letter of each line), Merwin makes us hear his words even as we read silently. Somehow, like a singer taking breath, we know just where one thought ends and another begins.

In The Lice, the 40-year-old Merwin sounded a cool detachment from the self by writing about reality’s small components: “The Moths, “The Dragonfly” “The Child.” In each poem, he finds himself in smaller things and becomes less significant. The “The River of Bees” he writes, ”…we were not born to survive/ only to live”. He is constantly reminded of what he doesn’t know (“For the Anniversary of My Death”).

Some 40 years later, Merwin survives remembering what he’s yet to learn. The Shadow of Sirius is about small illuminations, the light at the end of life. Looking back always feels like looking ahead. The small realities of his youth shine on his own mortality.

Punctuation, long extinct, lives invisibly in his phrasing. He writes, “we believe in measure/we do it with the first breath we take/and the first sound we make/it is in each word that we learn…”. Measure doesn’t require cues. It carries its own rhythm. This is something Merwin has gotten better at over the years, something he seems to acknowledge in “Worn Words,” one of the collections many attempts at perspective. Sometimes a page-long poem is a single sentence. Quoting only half of “A Codex” shows how well he can stretch and connect thoughts:

It was a late book given up for lost

again and again with its sentences

-

bare at last and phrases that seemed transparent

revealing what had been there the whole way

-

the poems of daylight after the day

lying open at last on the table

-

without explanation or emphasis

like sounds left when the syllables have gone

-

clarifying the whole grammar of waiting…

There are small things here as always, most often things of flight: herons, butterflies, mine canaries, a laughing thrush. Favorite subjects are revisited–survival of the natural world in light of his own preservation, the pacing of our lives and the audible measure of our works—all seen as if through a reverse lens. He humbly pays tribute to a poet, Ruth Stone, who makes our connection to the natural world more naturally than he, by making himself smaller, picturing her world in different light and granting her vision “beyond any words of mine.”

Merwin’s vision has been consistent over the last 40 years, even in the face of changing perspective. Approaching death just brings him closer to life-long themes. “Now that you are darker than I can believe/it is not wisdom that I have come to/with its denials and pure promises/but this absence that I can not set down…” Memory has become palpable, a thing of touch and taste, and it serves him well. His claim, never spoken directly, is an old cliché: he’s not getting older, he’s getting better. Readers can only agree.—Cabbage Rabbit