Brian Kim Stefans

Two Book Reviews

“Source Codes” by Susan Wheeler Salt Press ISBN: 1--876857--06--4 Paperback, 104pp.

Wheeler skirts along the troubled borders where virtual reality and Robert Lowell's Maine lobster town vie for our central geographic tropes, and where the "self" is variably a node in a cluster of rhizomic meanings or enmeshed in an aging, none-too-pretty (but lyrical) body. As in the fable of Benny, the beaver who only made a sound with his tail but did no work ("Benny slapped his tail to bang / A beat on hollow logs / Keen for external analogs / To the hums within his head.") Wheeler is obsessed (like Walter Benjamin, about whom this poem may be) with art in a time when the art object, in this case the poem, has lost its singularity and direct relationship to "work" and always echoes something else--a time when poems can literally be created by computers or be the product of text dumps from the web.

Despite these high-tech concerns, which place her within the interests of Charles Bernstein in his "Nude Formalist" mode (the wrong word used just wrongly in a formal/lyric style, floating high above the essentialism of common lyric conceptions), the technology of the poems, or Wheeler's "tradition," seems equally inspired by the allusive, symbolist-tinged, grand style of the Bishop/Lowell/Berryman line, and her talent for crushing rhymes that expose total disaffection, while owing something to the Artaudian school of pain as pleasure, take overblown advantage of what the often pessimistic "Age of Anxiety" strains of these poets had to offer: "You've been pure trouble since I thought you up, / Acie, hairnet, glass eye, wormy dick / through stretch pants across a girth so thick / even your dog don't jump."

Wheeler's pantheon of effects takes in everything from jingles ("Double bubble toil and trouble / Double, double, double your fun"), very tight syllabic stanzas, the odd mix of stentorian modes with cartoon-like plasticity that is familiar to readers of middle-period Ashbery, pseudo-wisdom literature modes ("The death of peace is no literature / Leisure is death without letters. / Death is without the leisure of letters. / A lettrist's death is without peace."), myths, fables, and Surrealist mantras, like this poem which, with a Swiftian turn right out of Gulliver's Travels, reverses the trajectory of Breton's famous paean to his wife with red hair: "lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself / a swollen juggler's platter face, or a thin / have clouds in her face, be crooked / mammis, her dugs like two double jugs / that other extreme, bloody-fallen fingers / she have filthy, long unpared nails [...] he lovers her once, he admires her for all this."

Source Codes, whose poems are only titled by numbers but have, on the contents page, what appear to be one-line citations for each one ("Text: Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy," for example), is punctuated by a series of interesting, if not as technically dazzling, collages that place figures in rooms and landscapes so that their Cartesian coordinates are possible, but socially they are quite out of place -- a couple necking in a cathedral, for instance. At the end of the book appear three Appendices, each suggesting, in their own way, how the presence of the poem as a series of singular marks of ink on a page is undermined by its "source," hence banishing forever the image of Coleridge merely transcribing Kubla Khan from his repressed, universal memory: first, a series of scribbled-over drafts of the poems in the book; second, a splash of HTML that (as any programmer could see) wouldn't work; and last, a series of what could be drafts for poems in a new book.

This remarkably subversive book -- in which Frost's "Provide, provide" becomes the great capitalist mantra "Produce, produce," and the singing Nightingale "nests in its noose" -- is at once an homage and an evisceration of what might call the main line of American poetry, not unlike Lowell's own evisceration of his aristocratic lineage in his early poems. In any case, Source Codes is one of the few books of poetry that truly synthesizes, even exhausts, the range of techniques that the 20th century provided for American lyric verse.

“4” by Noelle Kocot Four Way Books paper, 72 ISBN: 1--884800--32--7

An exciting debut from this New York-based poet, 4 is a highly technical accomplishment -- free-verse sestinas, rhyming quatrains and other verse forms seem to roll from her pen effortlessly -- and yet it manages to do without the pastiche or irony-drunk qualities of other contemporary quasi-formal versifiers.

Her knotty, provocative turn of mind -- part maudit/flaneur, part Kenneth Koch -- mixes darker, often Biblical imagery with a quirky humor, as in these lines from "The Traffic Cop": "I don't know how to say what I'm becoming / But it seems that every time / I consider lolling on the banks of the lake / Of infernal fire, the ice-cream truck / Toddles along, hauling its song." Casting herself as the renegade, even the vagabond, but with benign intentions peeking through, this poem concludes on a defiant absurdist note: "Your brand of peace disgusts me, do you hear? / I am the fugitive who drives the stampede / Of aardvarks across your lawns. / I have come to tip your cows."

Swift, intense, image-laden poems like "Ontology Train" are like modern pop versions of Rimbaud's "night in hell": "The night offers no apology / For its marvelous moody technique bathed in the venom / Of so many charged similes that conjure the hagiography / Of man as a vessel caught in a maelstrom / Which is its own blustery hubris pulsing / Through his homesick blood..." But her poems are usually about more pleasant (however complex) relationships, about the heavy burden of love and poetic thought that she shares with her interlocutor, a nameless, mystical (because "non-I") "you": "Yet you are concrete / Somehow; I know, I've heard your bee-like buzzing / In all the tiny leaves bursting from their sacs to greet / A magical universe..."

Her sestinas offer a lighter view, and probably sway closest to the ironic tones of someone like an Anthony Hecht (in the "Sestina Inverno") if only because the necessary play of the form, as in this brief (fictional?) recounting of a failed affair: "But in all the San Franciscoes / We could conjure in our souls, / Always there was the debris left perhaps by the quake of chiding souls / In the intermediate world, or by some ironic / Sandman reminding us that we were still asleep. San Francisco / Fantasy aside, you have to admit we sucked / As a couple..."

"Le Marteau sans maitre," dedicated to Pierre Boulez, has some of the qualities of Ashbery's Prospero-like narrator revealing the codes that lie under reality's deceptive surfaces: "In this way, our reactions to the written word / Open an angle of view increasingly peopled / By our club-shaped shadows, / And by our footprints on the road which lie / In an allegorically restrained / Framework of geometric shapes, as elegantly austere / As the simple arrangement of vessels on a table, " and concludes: "So you see, the scene / Is quite human after all, a liquid legend / Passing through crystalline sunlight / And flooding our well-supported interiors / With an atmospheric clarity emblematic / Of the essential questions blowing here and there / Like remnants of a foreign language..."

Kocot's images flow freely, perhaps too rhapsodically for some people's tastes, and one senses that her own style lies ahead of her. She writes unrestrained, and almost approaches a "naive" quality except that her obvious spiritual maturity, not to mention her lexical flexing and formal skill, deflects this impression. Like other young poets, such as Jennifer Moxley and Chris Stoffolino, Kocot has found a language for her emotions that pulls into her universe an abundance of memories, metaphors, and verbal twists, but she is unique in having found a way to mate an urban "post-punk" sensibility -- images of youthful rebellion, cultural disgust, hyperreal love and visceral superworldly elements abound in passionate bursts -- with a highly controlled, even learned form that makes reading her poems both an energizing yet cerebral experience.

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