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George Stanley, A Tall Serious Girl.
Jamestown: Qua Books, 2003.
Reviewed by Ted Byrne
The Rain 2:4 (July-August 2004): 6
“The Words / of a poem are a roundabout way of saying nothing.”
(“Phaedrus”)
At the moment I can still only puzzle over this book. I love the weight
of it, the binding and the cloth. I love the way the title put me off
until I discovered its secret, on the very last page. The painting on
the slipcover, by Fran Herndon, is as painterly as the writing is
writerly. There isn’t a colour I could comfortably name, except perhaps
blue. Judging by its title—“Eye on the Sea”—the painting is about the
sea. But surely it’s about paint, or painting. Or about looking at the
sea. Or, given its multiple internal framings, about various lines of
approach, various blues. The endorsements (encomiums) and the
introduction are true, but deadly. The poetry is everything they say it
is, but somehow remains uncontained in this big, handsome book.
The poems are not all comfortable being together, although I guess it
was inevitable. It’s almost like an assemblage of possible books. I
found myself making lists, which I do when I’m ill at ease: Eliot
(“Pompei”); Douglas Sirk (“Flowers”); “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane”
(“Flesh Eating Poem”); Mad Magazine
and the Jesuit Relations (“Tete Rouge”); Zane Grey (“Pony Express
Riders”); “The Dream Life of Walter Mitty” (“Punishment”), Cocteau
(“The Death of Orpheus”) ... and so on. Or: boy’s own serials;
post-surrealist assemblage; sixteenth century English verse; nineteenth
century opera; several intoxicants, including sex and camaraderie, all
in moderation; the city and that which is not the city (800 mile
distant suburbs); the Berkeley Renaissance; the Leisure Poets;
exception; Cubist collage; the New York Schools; Bolinas without
Buddhism. Or: hyperpoetical; gnomic; apoetical; workerist; erotic;
socio-political, but always familial; metaphysical; diaristic. In all
of which diversity, in all of its stammering, its perfect
articulations, the poetry enacts a grasping after “the poem”.
There is an ideology of the poem that stitches all of this together.
The poem as miracle, as gift or force (“The poem wrestles you / to the
ground”). The poem, or its source, is something greater than the
individual poem; the poet is the vessel of the poem; writing is a
writing toward, or an anticipation of the event of the poem (“just keep
writing this silly shit & pray for a poem”). This is then
dissimulated by a nonchalance, or an anxiety—a structural denial.
Extreme elegance of expression—
In a world of flowers
the enclosing is pregnant with silent clockwork
and the shade with death ...
—or perfectly metrical moments like
Leaves torn from dry branches
rise in the wind,
birds wheel in a bleak sky ...
are mocked by rough verses like
It’s pretty shitty
living in a Protestant city
& my heart too bleak for self-pity
or leveling observations like
Going to the store
for a pack of cigarettes, going to Prince George,
going to sleep, exactly the same
trip.
Even when the source is explicit, something denies it (“It’s the Psyche
in me that’s mad / because Eros has poured flame into me”). The orphic
and the refusal of the orphic (“You save me from philosophy / with your
Is, Is, Is”). All apparently artless, which is to say artful. And
ultimately lyric—odes and songs, even occasional pre-modern forms like
the triple quatrains of “White Matches”, or the sonnets “After
Verlaine”, “Icarus” and “Seventh Avenue”. He wrestles over and over
with the poem. The poem often wins.
The poems speak to each other, sometimes across great distances. But
they are also wonderfully self-contained. Like tracks on a recording.
We will all have our favorites. The book begins and ends with virtuoso
performances—the four poems that constitute “Flowers”, and “Veracruz”.
The first poem, “Pablito at the Corrida”, seems impenetrable at first.
An obliquity that persists throughout the book, but not in this
initial, Eliotic form. Once you get what it’s about—the death of a bull
fighter—the poem becomes a powerful metonymic description of raped
innocence. The following poem, “Pompei”, involves a similar trauma of
the innocents: “poems”, “the eyes of the matrons”, “virginity, the
little lost dog”, Pliny the Elder. The first line reads: “When I read
this poem I think of Pompei.” That is, the poem is not about Pompei.
“Flowers” works out the logic of this displacement, this writing.
Flowers die “stoically”, like Pliny, “to prove the syllogism, whatever
dies without reason is beautiful”, flowers die without reason, flowers
are beautiful. This logic is faulty, and the fault is in the premise,
which is disastrous. This is troubling, but not fatal. “In a rational
poem / written by the unwounded / he is found out by the unsounded
speech, irrational ...” The poem keeps coming back to the syllogism,
trying to restate it:
unable to stop the syllogism,
an unquenchable flame in your pants,
an imperishable flower, however fierce,
whatever lives to a purpose grows ugly,
you live to a purpose,
you grow ugly ...
But the poem is not about flowers, reason, or the ethics of beauty,
it’s about fear. Just as the first poem—this poem tells us—was not
about Pablito, but about a fearful love. I won’t comment on the last
poem in this sequence, “Flesh Eating Poem”—it’s too scary. Later on he
says that when he was a kid he was frightened of ticks in the forest,
“then / later it was Korea that was dangerous.” Finally, “to be a
person like anyone else / terrifies me.” It’s this being a person,
“like anyone else”, that the book is endlessly about, which is to say
near to, or proximate, as we are.
At the other end of the book, “Veracruz” culminates one of the themes
(“My father stole my cock from me”), an encryption (“an opaque unknown
sticking up out of stuff it was born in”), that emerges in the second
half of the collection, as it (the collection) becomes progressively
less immediate, or less anxious in its proximateness. It starts to look
back, as earlier it looked forward. Is nostalgia a mild form of
neurosis, or a cure for melancholy? “Veracruz” demonstrates the
likelihood of the latter proposition. “Veracruz” is a perfect poem and
should be published in those high school text books that probably don’t
even exist anymore, alongside Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost.
In between are extraordinary poems like “White Matches”, “Punishment”,
“A New Moon”, “Phaedrus”, “Paradise Shelter”, “The Berlin Wall” and
“Pub Night”. There is no typical poem that one could offer as an
example. In fact, it would be impossible not to give the wrong
impression of this book. Right now, re-reading the last half of the
book, with its local histories, travels and moral questionings, I’m
still drawn to the fractured, intense meditations on the real—for
Stanley and Lacan, the real is everything that doesn’t work—on love,
truth, time and death, and on the practice of self, that seem to be
addressed to us, in the city.
In this regard, “Pub Night” might be read as emblematic. “This I
record,” he writes, like a first century (BCE) Roman, or a thirteenth
century Florentine. But like a twentieth century cosmopolitan, his
thinking is in unresolved lemmas, a series of unclosed parentheses. In
“listening” to his lover, his mind is divided between the other (“you”)
and—not what the other is saying, but—the “variousness” of what is
being said. In this extreme inattention, which makes of the lover,
without more ado, what the lover always is in lyric poetry (i.e.
absent), it strikes him that “love is true, not just real, not just a
sentiment”. He records “this” on the torn tab of a cigarette pack.
However, “this” is not the trite observation that “love is true”, but
rather the contention that “Truth has a double / value:
obverse/reverse”. Strictly speaking, the obverse has priority over the
reverse, and yet both sides are always the other side of something: the
obverse is a reverse. The line break in the lines just quoted, for
instance, immediately gives rise to a reverse that undermines the
obverse, namely: “truth” has a double, which is “value”. Don’t forget,
it’s pub night, and we can think through all of this with a bit of a
slur. That is, it’s comic, deadly comic.
A couple of days later, he finds the aforementioned scrap of paper in
his pocket and tapes it in his “writing book”. There it takes on
another status, as it moves through the writing book, toward the
“record” that the poem finally is. But, as if to put us immediately off
that trail, he tapes it “under” a statement by Robert Duncan: “I never
made any vow to poetry / except to cut its throat, if i could / make
somebody laugh”. He notes in passing, that the “tab of the cigarette
pack has an obverse too.” Which is to say that his drunken note, to the
effect that truth has two sides, is itself on the reverse side (the
downside) of a publicity slogan: “Player’s / You can’t beat / the taste
of / Player’s.” As if the joke has not gone far enough, this is
accompanied by a the québécois version: “Rien ne surpasse
le gout de Player’s,” as if to ask, again, which (language) is the
obverse, which the reverse. Finally, he tries to resolve all of this by
pleading, like a maudlin drunk, that by “obverse/reverse” he means “one
Truth, i hope, not two [majuscule ‘T’, miniscule ‘i’] / ... a mystery,
plain & simple”. As simple that is
as a glass of beer (& needing
many
of same to perceive, no doubt, but
when perceived, perceived with a
lessening of tension, as something
simpler
than terror
A visiting English poet recently said, “When I got to New York, all the
talk was of George Stanley.” On another occasion, Stanley himself was
overheard to say, on the reception of this book, something like, “I’ve
emerged from total obscurity into relative obscurity.” It’s about time.
Tell me again
what you said, it is possible
everything I think
is wrong.