GRANDEUR OF THE UNIMPORTANT. - Free Online Library (2025)

The reasons a contemporary American poet might consider writingpolitical poetry these days are too many to name. I would include thegovernment's attempt to silence dissent in the media, in theJustice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, even members of Congress;to attack the research and consensus of scientists and science; todismiss manipulation of our democracy as "nonsensical"; toquestion the integrity of judges and elected officials; to attempt totake away health care from millions of Americans, especially thevulnerable, poor, women, children, and the elderly; as well as toalienate, discriminate against, and deport immigrants, while banningMuslims from coming to this country.

American poets might address festering issues that predate thecurrent political situation, writing toward issues like economicdislocation for working-age, non-college-educated people, a minimum wagethat hasn't kept up with inflation, too-easy access to guns, thegrowth of mass incarceration and along with that the old heritage ofslavery, segregation, and the continuing reality of widespreadracism.

"It is exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakeningconsciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, andpainful," Adrienne Rich once wrote. I've been thinking aboutthat sentiment lately, and it's led me to give a lot of thought toa quieter path for poets. I believe a greater threat to autocraticregimes is the writer who focuses on the inner life. Why? Because, asVaclav Havel reminds us, authoritarians know that a citizen who thinksfor themselves is the greatest threat to their hold on power. Perhapsnow is the time for poets to seek simple, private, intimate discoveries,to focus on the viscera of the human condition. Perhaps now is the timeto tend to what is dynamic within the human spirit so that a new day ofhealing can begin. Perhaps now is the time to be a poet of humanemotions, a subject relevant to seven billion human beings on theplanet.

And so the question is, does the world need more books of poemsabout the impressionistic fires of love? If you read what's in highfashion in American poetry today--poetry as a frontline defense againstracial and political aggression--the. answer might be no. And yet.

LI-YOUNG LEE, THE UNDRESSING, NORTON

Li-Young Lee's poems have always had the laidback pace of thesensualist, if not the novelist. His new book, The Undressing, tells animportant story about human nature. The closer he looks at the humanbody and the human psyche, the warmer the world becomes. For asensualist like Lee, the flesh and blood of the body are an enigma.Conspicuous and unseeable, the body baffles and befogs, rattles andembarrasses--all in (mostly) plain sight. Such as in the opening linesof the book, in the title poem--

Listen ,she says.I'm listening, I answerand kiss her chin.Obviously, you're not, she says.I kiss her nose and both of her eyes.I can do more than one thing at a time,I tell her. Trust me.I kiss her cheeks.

All of us experience the history and the soul and the physical achesand pleasures of the body palpably. Lee is interested in that, but healso is interested in showing the body as the stuff of illusion,suggesting the journey into our daily, sensual immersions holds the keyto a great many spiritual clarities. Perhaps that's why Lee'spoems feel like they keep coming to a never-ending longing--

Watching my quarry tumble down the sky ,I began to longto be born, to becomeone of the heirs to the sorrowsof hunger, the rites of slaughter,and the several names of desire and death.... the more I yearnedfor a new reckoning of fire and clay,a new ratio of body and song,just proportions of world and cry.

Although writing like this--so abstract about existence'sexistences, you might say--can blow one's mind, the book also has away of becoming predictable. You come to anticipate that, in Lee'spoems, experience leads to sorrow or to desire. A turn of the head is arite of passage. A name is a reminder of birth or death. A tree is aghost, a sign, a secret. This strikes me as knowledgeable, perhaps aruse, but also tenderly optimistic. Who doesn't need that?

Lee's poetry is the farthest thing I can think of fromavant-garde. Therefore it's always wonderfully out of fashion. Thepoems emerge with their simplicity and complexity intact. In a word,they are heartfelt, without condescension. It's the triumph ofsincerity over authenticity. Even the inclusion of an ecumenical Godsuggests the poet is a raconteur of astonishment--

Exhausted ,God slips me unfinishedunder God's pillow.I steep as long as God sleeps.And Time is a black butterfly, pinnedwhile someone searches for its name in a book.

It may be an imprecise thing to say, but I come away from readinglines like these thinking that Lee's elegance transports us intothe aspirations of yearning. Saturates us with it, And perhaps somereaders will find this absorption of his to be childlike, unworldly,arguing that everybody knows that it's the role of the poet inthese times to fight, to write something like, What do we want?/Political Poetry!/When do we want it?/Now! But a poem that's only apartisan argument--worse a slogan, worse yet, propaganda--is not apoetic experience. Nor is it convincing as a political one.

I suspect audiences will have no trouble relating to Lee's poemsas a respite from the vernacular of the poetry of violence. What I findis that Lee is at his most convincing when he unravels thevoluptuousness of experience so that he's left with pure physicalsensation. In those poems, as when he writes of grief and his mother,the body is more than a symbol of all that is mystical and eternal--

Both of us will have to wait until we're each alone to weep.

The mysterious gives way, boundlessness is bordered by the perimetersof human need, and the tears are going to have to fall as tears, atleast. The suggestive is just that, so long as it remains uninsistent.It's the poem not the premise that counts, so that the voyage ofexperience remains mysterious.

TARFIA FAIZULLAH, REGISTERS OF ILLUMINATED VILLAGES, GRAYWOLF

Tarfia Faizullah's Registers of Illuminated Villages is a bookabout reversals. Reluctant, asperous, harrowing reversals. It is also,as the title suggests, about validation, about the stubborn holler--WaltWhitman's word is yawp--against prejudice and massacre. Whether setin Northern Iraq, Bangladesh, California, West Texas, or elsewhere, thepoems enshrine outrage, and they loop in voices of those whose lives areimpeded by violence. Faizullah is a poet of historical imagination whois, if not disquieted, alarmed by the forces of an immoral contemporaryworld.

In Faizullah's hands the world is divided between the righteousand the wicked, and they are coiled together by destiny and horror witha knot that causes raw wounds--

I know his handis not pressedanymore againstmy breastplatetrying to pull me openwhen I curl intoa swan.You'll thank melater, he'd smile.

What you notice first of all are the ways a swamp of violenceinhabits all the people in these poems. Or is indifferent to them.Something elemental is meant to be offered at least, and you see it inlines like these--

i swear, not all of us die at war or in accidents

And here--

Forget the shaking and raving man I still see, for years now. Forget his voiceburning past me. Bitch, I need you,bitch, I need, I need, he moans,and I know it's not me he wants, butthe night is a varnished peeling wallagainst which I, too, want again to beroughly pressed.

These passages are gaming for psychological nuance, even as theyanimate a sprawling attentiveness to authenticity.

The book ping-pongs between poems of communal tragedy and moralgravity, on the one hand, and poems, on the other hand, mostly in thesecond half of the book, of unremarkable nostalgia structured likevoice-overs. The former manages outrage with confusion; the latter sagswith certainty. Forget the latter. There's much to admire in thefirst half of the book that reveals the insidious faces of bigotry,starvation, and violence: the "begging body" or the tauntingholler, "Go back to your own country!" Faizullah'ssubject is the poison of colonial culture, a history of plunder, and theheritage of human dignity in the face of assault. The failures of thedominant culture are mitigated by

the silken emancipation of a handkerchieffrom the mystery of your grandfather'spocket, the handfulof invisible everything--you tell your love it is okay to feel

This insistence on behaving like a human being--like a mother soworld-weary she "was used to drinking smoke"--is the kind ofimage that stays with you. Sizzling danger is brought up by decency andby ordinary tenderness that exposes a condition in which cruelty isroutine and injustice seems inexorable.

ANGE ML1NKO, DISTANT MANDATE, FSG

Ange Mlinko is a poet clearly fluent in literary conventions. Ifyou're wondering, I mean that as praise. Her restraint is laudable.Many poets of Mlinko's generation aspire to a fresh applique ofindirect speech, a smash-up informed by the Internet and pop music withthe politics of Jill Stein. It's hard for us, knowing as we do ofthe extraordinary versatility of American poetry over the lasttwenty-five years, to appreciate enthusiasm for a poetic method soimmemorial as rhyme and meter.

Mlinko's latest book, Distant Mandate, transcends thosefunctional elements. Her subject is the hide-and-seek of life and art.Schooled in myth, tormented perhaps, Mlinko writes as if literaryallusions could never mysteriously vanish from her imagination. Instead,they are enlisted to investigate everyday experience, includingsomething genteel like a weekend getaway. Here you find, from PadreIsland to Cyprus: roadsides, suburban enclaves, garden nooks, oilpatches, beach towns, headlands, tulip fields, listening posts,shuttered villas, the Acropolis, train station stopovers, and oldConfederate stomping grounds (this last locale rendered through asequence of villanelles). Each item is connected by a mind sparkling inthe literary past--

We could eat grapes half the morning like Goethe hunkered against an obelisk,waiting on the proper angle for the seasto see the Sistine sun-kissed

Too, a mild grievousness permeates this book, as if Mlinko'sinterests in poetry were to renovate what's decrepit about lifewith stunning embroidery--

Like Benedict and Beatrice, I thought-- as we went around the gardentrying, with words, a precarious knot

Or something literarily supernatural, like the following lines asmission statement for the book--

Nothing is an accident in love or literature .I came to the library for The Aspern Papers.Not on the shelf. Not to be deterred,I read 'Waitingfor the Barbarians.' It appearsin retrospect that this was actually the apterchoice...

I found myself wondering if these allusions were akin to fadedphotographs, or like specters from a well-stocked bookshelf, or likerecently listened--to Spotify playlists. Such poetic clippings emerge asif filtered through binocular vision, revealing a rich Western Civpreoccupation. I kept wondering, what's behind the mood music? WhatI experienced is that Mlinko's M.O. is something much more thanfinding literature imagined into life. What's behind it, I'vedecided, is a haunting, like in a fable, where "everything isbroken by the tides." It's poetry as vigil. Something, orsomeone, has gone away. You feel it in poem after poem. Or might go awaysoon enough. And the loss is withstood by connecting what's athand:

Haze mere or filie; people-pleaser, cocktease,she-bear, in niqab, in getup, in stays;having taken Saint Paul's advice to seizethe gold ring: Who groks to the paradox?Though one would sooner burn than freeze.

In the end the feverishness breaks in favor of formal restoration, anappetite for coherence over rapture, like the geometry of an invisibleorder.

I bring it up because, in contrast to the Faizullah book, whichdevotes so much energy to human conflicts, Mlinko's interests--evenwhen the iconography becomes stiff--are in not distinguishing thedifference between the present and the past, the real and the imagined.If you've ever read a novel and come to think, "Hey, thosecharacters are alive, same as you and me," you know what she'safter. Time, in these poems--time, experience, anecdote, theliterary-layered word-puzzle--is offered as a consecration. Life may bebric-a-brac, but literature is exalting.

DAVID BAKER, SCAVENGER LOOP, NORTON

One of David Baker's central images in Scavenger Loop is thepoetic equivalent of a manifest for contemporary life lived amongeveryday things--

--broken shutters, musty box springs, two ancient-at-eight-years-old laser printersand all manner of lawnmowers, power tools, handtools, shredded planters, to name only a bitof the stuffcrammed in my barn

We experience such castoffs not just as formal, neo-pastoral utensilsand gizmos but as testimony of an American style: headlong, spectral,commonplace, even imbued with the grandeur of the unimportant. Thespirit is dolorous, though not fraught.

Scavenger Loop is an achievement of artifice mixed with candor. Ashorthand take would have you notice this book's overviews andforegrounds in the rich landscapes of the lyric and the elegy thatpredominate, populated by swifts, cats, rain, moths, ash, weeds,beetles, fawn, windmills, bee pollen, a pair of doves, and so on. Butthose romantic imprints are put in heroic contrast to new, contemporaryspatial dimensions: engine velocity, suicide bombers, Twitter, Facebook,propane tanks, Ken dolls, CRV, OMG, DraughtGard, Roundup, Agrigold,Archer Daniels Midland, genetic modifications. Holding it together areBaker's passionate testimonials and ambition for moraltransparency. The conditions for his poems are not entirely identical,but they do loop around each other. Sometimes they are in response to apredisposition, like a figure of speech, and the result might be aseries of odes. Other times they are constructed out of the nature ofthings, such as heavy shadows or floods, windows or bells,anniversaries, even heaven--

the cicadas keep up their own dry rain ,passing on high from limb to limb.I don't know what has shocked me more,that you are gone, that I am still here,that there is music after the end.

That's the kind of passage that fastens itself to the splendorof the familiar order of the lyric--start with a stimulus, add emotionalcomplexity giving rise to metaphor, resolve the metaphor. It'sharder than it looks. It's what Baker hails as--

Immensity of song--to be so small that throat--that singer wren on a redtree--amid the wicks of wet fruit

Above all, there's something gleeful in the way he defends thelyric. Its limitations aren't seen as vacancies, but filaments toinhabit like a bright surface of containment--

"Join us as several guest poets read from and display their latest or landmark e-erasures" Which means: take Dickinson, rubsome letters out, you can be famous, too.Because I could not stop for Death--make thatBe a cold sop. I stood at--. You get thepicture. Sappho: without time's injury.

It's fair to say, I think, that Baker's undisguisedargument is for the sincerity of writing, and it's something that apoet--in the glowing light of the imagination, of "time'sinjury"--fashions and sculpts, chisels and trims, so thateverything not foregrounded shrinks away. It's not the authenticthat's supreme. It's the artifice. Put another way, hisstructural arrangements and correlated figures organize his thinking.Poems flatten then rise up to meet other poems so that in the endexperience is--

like a bruise smeared through the wet few uppermost leaves .Not yet light so much as less dark.

This is poetry of textures and stitches, made to cinch the ineffablelowdown of the natural world shivering before us. The world may bewarped. Its halftones may be creased. But it is not formless. Nor willit resist a poet's momentary buffing.

DAVID ST.JOHN, THE LAST TROUBADOUR: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, ECCO

One thinks of David St. John, whose The Last Troubadour: New andSelected Poems was published last year, as quintessentially aconfessionalist. Yet his poems are tied, like a ribbon, to anexpressionism most confessionalists avoid.

By expressionism I mean a yearning for a higher plain of existence.Think, mystical. Think, escape from experience. To St. John, poetry ismeant to transcend immediate, raw, vulgar, political experience. Notthat he trucks in fairy tale, but the mood he has held to since 1976when he published his first book, Hush, is a deeply felt route out ofthe grotesque into the splendid--

As I bend Close above the iris, I see the trainDrive deep into the damp heart of its stem, & the gravelOf the garden pathCracks under my feet as I walk this long corridorOf elms, arched

In these lines from the elegy "Iris," published when St.John was in his late twenties, one already sees a main trait of hismature poems pressing through: the sense of an intertwined humanitythat, while broken, or whacked out of proportion, is always jostlingback toward repair--

Didn't you notice That when you fell to your knees I tooFell & kissed this scarlet earthBlackened by the lyre of your wings

St. John aims to be an imaginary realist. His poems crystallize inthe face of two primary erotic subjects: ecstasy and memory. He is notthe first poet to discover how the nearness, or the imminence, of deathcan absolve the imagination--

And how could I not trust the advice Of a woman who, with the ball of her exquisite thumb,Carefully flared rouge along the white cheekbonesOf the most beautiful women in the world?Last night, as we lay in the dark,The windows of her bedroom open to the cypress,To the stars, to the wind knocking at those stiffUmbrella pines along her garden's edge,I noticed as she turned slowly in the moonlightA small tattoo just above her hip bone--It was a dove in flight or an angel with itsHead tucked beneath its wing,I couldn't tell in the shadows ...Or, if not absolve it, then empower it, liberate it, relieve it--I know my place & I know my business & I know thoseMelodies melodies & the music of my own mind

As I say, he is not the first to discover how the imminence of deathcan free the imagination, but he is candid about it. From the fires oflove and the insistent past come confessions of beautiful secretslodged, or uttered, between terrors--

When I came to your hotel room You were sitting in a hard chairJust by the windowHalf-slumped & distractedLooking out at the persistent rainThen silently back at meYour ghost your own ghostHad already come

What you might see here is how St. John goes beyond emptied,burned-out emotions so that he can realize what can and can't standanymore, but needs to be lifted and taken home. It's as if from thecopious ashes of expressionism comes something unassuageable. Somethinglike realism? No. Something like life. The poems in this collection (ofpoems published over four decades) invent life as poetic sentience, iswhat I mean. Anecdote precipitates the lyric. You see a similarpredisposition in Li-Young Lee and David Baker's books. Namely, thelyric stands against unmediated thought or blurted-out thought. Itstands up for the vividly intimate, as St. John does at the beginning ofan elegy for his friend, the poet Larry Levis--

The one who should write my elegy is dead When we made that bet he said most likelyI'd be the loser writing his elegy insteadNothing is as beautiful as nothing he once said

Life is beauty and life is hell--the locus of confessionalism. Peoplemerge together, lovers, friends, strangers. And then the distancesbetween them grow. In order to write about it, St. John has developed arepertory of tactics to interpret love: something happened, and thensomething happened underneath that too. No longer imprisoned by time,freed inside the lyric, one surpasses the other.

St. John's sense of being in pursuit of, I guess I'd callit, psychic relocation is consistent throughout his career. Meridiansare approached and crossed. Songs are sung without forgiveness received.Patience shifts from hard to noble. A slow dance becomes a lostreflection. These transcendent experiences are pleated, explicit,butting against the edges of perception--

The nothing you know is as immaculate a knowing as any moment going from a distance into dawn

St. John's determination for religious gesture, even if itsometimes includes adoring his subjects, also includes a logic thatfavors pathos and submission. It comes from the traditional,outstretched figure of the poet as troubadour, though in St. John'srendering he's not so much the French minstrel composing poems ofcourtly love as he is a balladeer in a black leather jacket with onehand on the bottle and the other inside a stanza. In a phrase, a man ofsorrows, well-mannered, dense with feeling, habitually hallucinatory.This stance carries St. John's poems beyond moralizing closer tothe territory of invocation--

Tell me. What is the "beautiful," what is the"lost," & what lives still just at the edge of the soundof the trees? It could be the syllables of habit; it could be a singlephrase of gratitude ... or an unbroken prayer. Tell me. What will stay,& what will hold its grace & last ease?

I suppose one could read these lines as slouching toward nostalgia.But they also enlist his fears, and they seek out and sometimes findmeaning for personal history on the other side. The word that comes tomind finally is poise, that place in lyric poetry between splendor andfright.

David Biespiel's most recent book is the memoir The Education ofa Young Poet. His sixth book of poems, Republic Cafe, will be publishedin 2019.