Parallels

I recently finished reading 1984, one of many classics on my to-read list. I had what I’m pretty sure is a common experience in that I thought, as I read, that anyone who sees this as merely a science fiction novel doesn’t understand it. In fact, as O’Brien tortured Winston and explained the nature of reality from the point of view of the party, I recalled words from a senior aide to the Bush administration. It was unnerving how similar their thinking was.

Here is the paragraph from Ron Suskind’s article “Without a Doubt” published in 2004.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Here is how O’Brien characterizes reality in 1984:

But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

In other words, as the senior Bush aide put it, “we create our own reality.”

Well, for the few people out there who follow this – “fit though few” as Milton said – I decided I should start trying to keep this blog going a little. Instead of insisting that I must always and only post completed essays, which is prohibitive, I’m going to include updates on readings, publications and random thoughts on art, poetry, history, music, and anything else that I simply find interesting. I can only hope you find it interesting too.

It’s been so long since I’ve posted anything, that far too much has happened to post all at once. But to begin with what’s happened in my publishing life, my next 2 books have been accepted for publication: Living in the Counterpoint will be published by Finishing Line Press in January. This book is available now for prepublication purchase on their website: http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm.

I will here confess that I’m nervous about this period of purchasing. From now until November 10th, the number of people who order will determine how many copies will be printed in January. It is a nail-biting affair to receive e-mails of sales on a weekly basis and see how few have come in. Sadly, I have a long way to go. But my nerves aside, I’m very pleased with the cover. The photo was provided by my friend, Kaitlyn Chow.




Also, the people who blurbed the book were very generous in their comments:



“Michael T. Young has crafted a metaphysics of memory in all its ache and luster. These poems pin down ghosts; finger the stirrings of nostalgia and its seeming perpetuity. Through a yearning to define those feelings most elusive, Young succeeds in unveiling them. Living in the Counterpoint coaxes introspection and haunts like a summer dusk, it is a true achievement.”

-- Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity


“With the deftness of a magician, Michael T. Young moves us seamlessly between point
and counterpoint, so seamlessly that we are almost unaware of the shifts from the living to the dead, from light to dark, near to far, and early to late. In tightly crafted gem-like poems, he contemplates fossils, diamonds, headstones, rivers, bridges, and even a slug, ultimately achieving and imparting ‘a deep knowledge of the earth.’”

-- Diane Lockward, Poet Laureate of West Caldwell, NJ and author of Temptation by Water

My next full-length collection, The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost, will be published by Black Coffee Press in 2013. It’s listed on their website under their imprint, Eight Ball Press: http://www.blackcoffeepress.net/shop/page/6?sessid=VBfK8qiGV1UzGi4VrtyR8KLHcJzKCBpuAAj4urE9wByNr7wbwT8COTYreCj1LNPK&shop_param=.


In addition, many poems have recently been accepted for publication in print and online journals. The Potomac Review, Off the Coast, Edison Literary Review, Mayday and Eskew all took work recently. I’m currently in the online journals: Scythe, The Literary Bohemian, The Fine Line and Jellyroll. Links to them are below. My poem “Counting Apples” will be in the forthcoming issue of Meadowland Review.

Scythe: http://scytheliteraryjournal.com/
The Literary Bohemian: http://www.literarybohemian.com/poetry/poem/renewing-my-passport-by-michael-t-young/
The Fine Line: http://thefineline00.wordpress.com/issues/
Jellyroll: http://www.jellyrollmagazine.com/currentissue.html

Well that’s a brief update of the year. Next week, I will try to post something more interesting than a laundry list.

Michael

A Critique of Pure Imagination

Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale is worthy of a dissertation. I return to it often to consider its subtleties of diction, lineation and thought. Its nuances are endlessly provocative. Recently I was considering the entirety of the imaginative movement of the poem and the speaker’s final state and in that final state I saw a consequence unique among the Romantic poets.

The speaker of the Ode imaginatively projects qualities onto the bird throughout the poem, the first is happiness. This projection of happiness is the speaker’s tenuous connection to the bird, his means of escaping the heartache and sorrows of human life. The listener’s ability to find this escape in the bird’s song is dependent upon his ability to project onto the bird what he imagines its song means. This imaginative projection or fancy is simultaneously a movement toward death in its most intoxicating characteristic, which is as a way of escaping pain. It is Hamlet’s desire

To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,

This is the core of Ode to a Nightingale. The Ode’s speaker simply wishes to fantasize himself into nonexistence, “to cease upon the midnight with no pain.” It is here, in desiring death that he then projects onto the bird the quality of immortality. This immortality is insinuated primarily through the realization that the bird’s song today is the same as in ancient times and will be the same tomorrow after the speaker is dead.

The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:

The speaker doesn’t think to partake of the bird’s immortality as he does of the happiness. The consequence is that, by the end of the poem, the happiness seems to be stolen from the listener when the word “forlorn” invades his musings and returns him to the human world of thought and sorrow. But the projected immortality of the bird remains intact and flies off with the bird as the song fades into the distance. Thus the imaginative projection splits and the speaker is stuck in a kind of in-between where his imagination still projects the immortality of the bird outward into the deepening silence but the happiness ends as his mind recoils inward to the thoughts of pain, aging, sickness and death that plague daily, mortal life.

Here, at the end, the poem enters a realm that is unique among the Romantic poets. Unlike other poems of other Romantic poets, especially Blake or Shelley, the Ode is a kind of critique of pure imagination. The whole imaginative effort of the speaker to posit happiness in the nightingale and then take part in that happiness, to posit immortality in the bird and then, in that context of ecstatic, immortal, joyful song desire death almost to the pitch of willing it true, finds its end in the reality of individual suffering and the limits of human thought. Once again, as the Ode so often does, it recalls Hamlet. In this instance it recalls Hamlet’s comment that, “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” For the Ode’s speaker, the human condition is one of bad dreams bounded in a nutshell. The imaginative effort is to free oneself from it. But the freedom is temporary and when it ends, leaves in its wake a feeling of betrayal because “the fancy cannot cheat so well/As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.” The dreamscape the speaker inhabits at the end of the Ode is not the enchanted, mythological dreamscape of most of the Romantics, even Keats in his other poems, but instead it is a dreamscape of suspicion, where everything is haunted by scrutiny and doubt.

The Long Walk Out of Suburbia

In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear
– Blake

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
– Unamuno


I’ve been thinking lately about what it means as a poet to have grown up in suburbia. What foundation was set for my sensibility in that first landscape? It is more specific than that since I grew up in the suburb of a very small city. I didn’t grow up on the outskirts of New York or Chicago. I grew up in Pennside, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Reading, itself only just meeting the definition of a city in terms of its population when I was young. But a suburb nonetheless that must have impressed in me its tailored landscapes, those manmade terrains that are different from either the parks of a city or the untamed edge of the truly rural.

The word itself, “suburbs” is from the Latin “sub” meaning “under” and “urbs” meaning “city.” It comes from Roman times when the poor lived at the foot of the city hill outside the wall. But in modern times that “under” means something else and has a weighty significance, at least, as I reflect on it. For all its scenic advantages, the suburban sensibility feels inferior to its urban brother, feels less savvy, less witty, less cultivated. It lives in the shadow of the urban and it may contribute to why, when I was young, I preferred the eccentric to the accepted. I had rather sit alone and think than talk with my peers. It’s why I felt a kinship with a thin tree at the crest of one of the surrounding mountains. It stuck out crookedly, a bald patch on its right side, but even from miles away it was beautifully distinguishable from the monotony of the level ridge of maples.

That need for distinction has long impaired my poetic voice, loaded it with a self-conscious groping that I still labor to overcome every time I write. Any poet worth his salt is beyond the need to impress and is instead driven by the need to realize his vision. But finding that vision requires confronting life right on the spot, at its dirtiest. This is not something the suburban sensibility is trained to do. If suburbia is anything, it’s a place to learn how to evade, to dodge the shadows in the corner, to avoid ever saying what is really meant. Stating the unequivocal truth could disturb the clean-cut image of life among the trimmed lawns and hedges, the neat streets and manmade lake. In suburbia, even rage and neurosis are ordered and pretty.

That clean order — even nature itself tamed — might be what led me to first desire order in art, which is not the same as clarity. Beauty ruled all themes; the music of a poem exempted it from making sense. I could not then have conceived of aspiring to Lowell’s prayer, “Pray for the grace of accuracy/Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination,” at least not semantically. The pulse of a genuine moment was something too real for me to dare touch, not that I wasn’t aware of it. But the suburb is an adult version of a childproofed environment, all the edges are sanded down or cushioned, all the hazards are locked away. Like a child, you know the forbidden is in the locked drawer; you just come to accept the rules of the house because you don’t know any other world. These are the dark distances between people in suburbia, distances astutely explored by the poet Carl Dennis.

Within me that distance has been the long stretch between the artificial voice of my expected self and the authentic voice of my real life. All my effort since starting to write has been to bridge that distance, to close the gap between them. The best poetry I’ve written in recent years has been about how to dodge expectations, not only of others but also and perhaps especially those of oneself. Henry Miller said that for the writer attempting something new, nothing is worse than his friends. In struggling to realize an authentic voice for my poetry, no friend has been a greater enemy than that one in my head who keeps telling me how I should sound, who I should be, what I should say.

How Freudian this comes off is not lost on me. But my concerns are aesthetic and philosophical, not psychological. I refuse to call that friend my superego, though he has helped me be a better person, that is, to not say everything on my mind since that isn’t always helpful. He is the master diplomat, but this makes him a poor poet, since the poetic voice is not really about right and wrong or even kindness, but rather it’s about clarity, insight, articulation of the fully realized moment. But the fully realized moment cannot be abridged, even if it is edited. That is to say, it must be complete even if it has only one, true articulation, the way Coleridge defined poetry as “the best words in the best order.” So I must use every means to stifle that unpoetic diplomat, to arrive at the truly poetic moment and simply write. This has not been easy.

Between Keats’s idea that poems should come as leaves on a tree and the truism that the real art in a poem is hiding the art, there is the suburb. The suburb is the artificial wearing the natural as lingerie. It wraps itself in green and decorates its hair with flowers. It’s a seduction and a siren’s song because it is a nowhere, an in-between world that’s neither wild nor tame, neither urban nor rural. It cannot disrobe and show itself in naked honesty because its beauty, indeed, its very substance is in its apparel. It may be why, as a young poet, I was obsessed with form but was equally nagged by the dread that I didn’t have the mind to be a poet. I always felt that one day I would be found out, that, like the suburb, I was actually all appearance.

The border of a suburb is not wild. This is not because there are no untamed animals, no skunks or deer ducking behind nearby pines. It’s because between nature and such communities there are enough artificial hurtles that one is free to romanticize nature. So from my street to the nearest woods, the transitions — the community pool, the football field and tennis courts, the creek and surrounding road — were obstacles to any entrance into both the wild and the creative. I sometimes think it may be why I’ve struggled with transitions in my poetry. By contrast, the urban sensibility doesn’t feel the need to connect the dots or supply bridges. From stanza to stanza, either you’re smart enough to keep up or this poem isn’t for you. And it’s important to realize this isn’t snobbery but simply apprehending the world on your own terms, being oneself without apologies. But I’ve always been afraid of losing people along the way, and so tediously laid the groundwork for every step. The problem with such carefulness is that it crowds out the reader’s imagination. A reader should find a home for his imagination within a poem; it should be a place for him to breathe deeply and settle down, even if it’s into the mystery of what it’s all about. This means the total picture includes untamed elements, some invasion of the dark and disordered into the context of the ordered creation. Without it, there is no perspective or context and thus no true insight or cause for wonder.

For the urban sensibility, the edge of the city is not the edge of order, but the edge of civilization. This differs from the suburban sensibility in that it is not mere landscape, but an expression of our humanity. Civilization lies within us. So, for the urban dweller, the edge of the city is the edge and end of humanity. But for the suburban sensibility, the neat, clean order of the landscape is not an indwelling reality. It is, rather, imposed on both the outward and inward landscapes. The edge of suburbia becomes the edge of the safe world. It is not that humanity ends there, but that understanding ends there. Beyond is the incomprehensible, the unpredictable. So my poems have always had a laborious, plodding need to be understood, to be safe. The problem with this is that the best poems of the day are born in liminal spaces, in the outskirts, beyond the longstanding definitions. They risk being misunderstood even by the majority. It is Blake being called mad at the end of his life and his work waiting until the 20th century to be given its just admiration.

I left suburbia for New York City nearly twenty years ago. But suburbia stayed in me. It limited my art, my growth as a poet. I could never escape the logic of its layout. It infected my lines and stanzas, ordering them into a beautiful, sanitary banality. Then I read George Oppen’s poetry. He was dense, difficult and passionately struggling toward clarity. I had never before been enthralled by any objectivist poet. But he was someone who took me in thoroughly. In that rapture, I read prose about him and interviews and came across his idea of a poem as a certain “sequence of disclosure.” This idea was new to me since I had always measured a poem’s movement not by its semantic unfolding but by its phonetic modulation. I lived by Joseph Brodsky’s dictum that “for the poet, phonetics is semantics.” But this dictum had been too native to me to help me grow. I had to abandon it in favor of a “sequence of disclosure,” a modulation of meaning that was itself the music and movement of a poem.

At the same time, I had been reading a number of other poets and had recently read Horace’s 13th Ode from the second book. It was a poem that startled me by its seamless progression. It starts simply with Horace contemplating contemptuously a tree on his property and ends among the shades in Hades. I remember the shock at the end of the poem, of realizing where I was and how Horace had taken me there without jarring my senses. I had been transported from the simple earthly reality of his yard to the netherworld of shades and no charm was invoked or Sybil consulted. There were no hurtles as in suburbia. I found in this poem an example of that sequence of disclosure, something I found I then had to master, because it was a way of escape, not away from reality, but into reality.

A few other poets, modern poets, helped me cut the key to that door: Gerald Stern, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dobyns and Derek Walcott. These were the major stars in that guiding constellation. What was interesting was that, as I wrote the first poem of escape ten years ago, the realization of this new aesthetic, this new philosophy, occurred to me in geometric terms.

The idea that a poem should come full circle was not only axiomatic because of its long tradition but inevitable to my suburban sensibility. Although everyone in suburbia works elsewhere, life there is self-contained. Work is merely what you do to support life in suburbia. But life in suburbia is suburbia and all roads there lead back to its center. This was a form of circling the wagons. A poem then was always about redemption. However, now my desire, my driving need, was for something parabolic, something arcing out and away and ending as far from where I started as possible and arriving there with an inevitability that should not resemble logic. Logic is only one kind of meaning, but all meanings and, in fact, most meanings are not logical. And the most meaningful material is at the edge of what we know and just beyond. It is only here that poems matter, have an almost life or death significance, because it is only from here that one can look back on where you came from, and have the perspective to see the immense battle for identity involved in each moment taken for granted. From here it is possible to reenter the streets of suburbia and not be governed by them.

Thoughts on Refusing Heaven, Poems by Jack Gilbert

Although not a perfect collection, this collection is worth a permanent place on everyone’s bookshelf. Winner of both the LA Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, it is deserving of these awards for the sheer life-affirming quality of the poems. These are a wondrous celebration of life not only in spite of its brevity and flaws but precisely because of its brevity and flaws. What, in the mind of others are failures, within this collection, are transformed into the substance of happiness and beauty. Memory becomes the storehouse of a future life and lazy days doing nothing, the substance of the most joyful times.

Gilbert has assimilated much of Eastern thinking more intimately, more personally, than many other poets. They are not mere stylistic tactics or adopted stances, but insights reaped by living through them, seeing how life affirms the mysticism of Taoism and Buddhism. Thus they are coherently westernized. This is so because Gilbert doesn’t always open with simply accepting their terms. Some of the poems are the struggle toward realization told from the point of view of a western mind.

However, on the whole, his poems are not parabolic, moving from point to point to a final destination, and they are not circular in reaching a resolution or redemption. They are more like a tetherball circling closer and closer to a central point. The iterations the poems cycle through may, at times, lack the peremptory quality that is typically valued in poetry, but they make up for it with their exuberance and joy, in finally transforming the daily and pedestrian into gold, in observing the overlaps of places and identity through time, in noticing the interpenetration of histories within a single life. So his poems may resist memorization because they lack inevitability, but his poems are, in spite of it, memorable.

Not a poet of great music, but a wonderful poet of insight, of the turn of thought that startles or delights. This is the music of reflection, not the right note but the well-articulated idea. If he were a painter, he would be Magritte. Because of this remove, that he is an idea poet and not a musical poet, he is fond of simile. His use of simile does not always please, but it does often provoke. And this is the point. If his similes produce a pause in reading, this does not stall the poem since it causes a consideration of the insight that constitutes the poem. That is, Gilbert does not employ simile as a mere lyrical comparison but as a way to inspire us to think and notice. But thinking means considering, pausing, lingering, which a poem called “Burning (Andante non troppo)” is all about. This is a collection worth lingering over, worth allowing yourself to enjoy. It may actually help you to enjoy life more. Few collections can claim such a triumph.

Skating with Heather Grace -- Poems by Thomas Lynch

Skating with Heather Grace
Poems by Thomas Lynch

This book has been on my shelf for a number of years. It was a collection I occasionally pulled down in passing, read a poem or two, and then returned to its ledge among the other titles in my library. Recently I took it down and carried it with me for several days, reading it from cover to cover a few times. It is something I should have done long ago.

Published in Knopf’s Poetry Series in 1986, this is Thomas Lynch’s first book. As such, the biographical information doesn’t say anything about his poetic career but highlights the fact that he makes his living as an undertaker. Although heavy-handed in pointing this out, it clearly informs every poem.

Robert Frost’s cool philosophical understanding of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion is here heightened to a pitch to hold off despair in the face of death and loss. Lynch has an almost desperate desire for cohesion.

sing the same song over and over
because the sound it makes keeps me intact.
(“Noon on Saturday”)

This is the ars poetica of these poems. But it’s not an existential cry, as Matthew Arnold saying, “I am fragments.” It is not his psyche he fears will disintegrate, but his actual body.

I’m frightened witless at the prospect of
some bomb or cancer out there with my name on it.
(“Damage”)

What underlies these poems is an acute feral vulnerability, a profound awareness of how tenuous our hold on life really is.

you and your song rise in the leafy air
chancy as bass spawn in a mallard’s underwings.
(“A Clearing in the Woods”)

All of this plays into his adroit manipulation of rhyme, assonance and repetition. There may be the occasional and slight drift away from thematic elements in favor of a phonetic choice, but never enough to spoil the tone and eventual progress into these meditations that are rooted in earth and blood. Considering the tack taken in his poem “A Note on the Rapture to His True Love,” the identities that comprise its rhyme scheme work in conjunction with the idea that the rapture will bring a second life to those taken, a kind of repetition that the poem subtly rebuffs with the final identity being broken where “leaves” is not repeated but transformed into “left,” the final word. It plays on the double-entendre of “left” allowing those who are not taken up in the rapture to find their own salvation in moments of transcendence, which, in the end, like everything else, are finite.

All of these poems are full of the longing for the ethereal, a life beyond the earthbound and what birds, and gulls in particular, in the collection come to symbolize:

out where the gulls glide on the edge of weather
songs in praise of rootlessness and wayfare
(“Learning Gravity”)

And in another poem there is the desire to

join them in the air beyond the land
and make my life with them diving between islands.
(“A Dream of Death in the First-Person”)

But this cannot be. We are all bound by

laws
whereby things rise and fall, arrive and take
their leave according to their gravity.
(“Learning Gravity”)

Those birds and what they represent and everything beyond them are finally

a new life form light-years removed from me.
(“I Felt Myself Turning”)

Or as Lynch puts it in the penultimate poem of the collection

we, none of us survives
our awful will to live or will to die.
(“Damage”)

It’s said that every elegy is really written about the writer’s own fear of death. This may be the case, but for Lynch, an undertaker by trade, he sees death as random and omnipresent, an ever looming threat against everyone. When, in the poem “Damages,” he invokes the collective pronoun, it’s not to summon an authority he doesn’t have, the way a bad poet might. Instead, it’s to truly touch on something affecting us all. It’s why what is so attractive in these poems is their deep compassion. They are heartbreakingly compassionate. And in this context, other elements, the moments within life, those transcendent but doomed moments, are prized in their fragile brilliance, such as where he tries to remember the naked body of a friend he once slept with years ago, or he watches his young daughter skate and realizes he will gradually need to let her go as she gets older. These are the moments of meaning, of history, of personal significance that are given such deep poignancy against the relentless and inevitable triumph of the meaningless. It saddens them but increases the attention given to them.

Skating with Heather Grace is one of those collections where the poet faces our common abyss and it is a more honest collection than you will typically find because it is not angry but worried, concerned in the way one is when you know such terrible things happen daily, when you see that everyone around you is standing at the edge of the same inescapable end. Here, the resigned faith that “life goes on,” is a poetic principle, it is an amor fati that demands we sing and sing loudly. To paraphrase Roethke, who is invoked in the longest poem, it is the kind of shaking that keeps us steady. It is the precarious balance between two polarized dreams. It is where we live and where these poems take place. This is not only a collection worth reading, it a collection worth rereading.

Tomorrow’s Living Room -- A Review

Tomorrow’s Living Room
Poems by Jason Whitmarsh


This is Jason Whitmarsh’s first book. It is winner of the 2009 May Swenson Poetry Award. And it is a deserving collection. One that may at first mislead you with its wit and simplicity. His deft casualness makes it possible to breeze through these poems without thinking of the odd statements being made. Indeed, in his citation, Billy Collins, who chose the book for the award, points out the “pleasurable disorientation” of the language, its “mixture of directness and imaginative surprise.” And the back of the dust jacket describes them as “alternately wry and dark.” These are all accurate observations of the surface textures, but to some extent, miss the point, miss why these poems are such a surprising tonal blend.

The opening poem is called “Forecasts” and is a grouping of four quatrains, all involving some sort of evasion, distance or submerged emotion controlling the actual moment. For instance, the second quatrain goes,

The rock fell from a great and far-off height
and plummeted silently through the roof
into bed, where it replaced your heart.
That’s what I think. It’s why you’re so aloof.

This distance, heightened by the internal monologue, foretells the rest of the collection. Indeed, that insistent, “That’s what I think” is at the core of Whitmarsh’s linguistic landscape. The poems are often pivoting on people so involved in what they think, they fail to make any real connection with others. Another poem, early in the book, is “One Art.” It is a satire of the famous Bishop villanelle, brilliantly using the exact same rhymes in the sequence of Bishop’s original. But in this version, the speaker is talking about wishing to be Bruce Lee when he was young so he could hit his “way out of disaster.” The poem concludes,

It’s evident
why I wanted to be a kung fu master,
as though desire alone could prevent disaster.

This desire is at the heart of the original Bishop poem, a speaker who is aching to convince themselves of something they don’t truly believe. This resonates to the key struck by the rest of Whitmarsh’s collection, which, on the whole, addresses the disasters that come from entertaining our fantasies too much, the emotional traumas of too much indulgent daydreaming. It’s why the tone is such a peculiar blend of humor and loneliness.

The title of another poem is “He Said These Things, Not Even I Could Forgive Him.” The first line of this poem goes

I’m kind of reluctant to mention the superhero powers
I’ve acquired since last we talked.

This is an opening line that leaves one expecting to laugh the rest of the way through. But the poem ends with the speaker saying,

In my dream
I grabbed an electric fence and when I woke I said
how strange to be in pain in a dream and you said
I was lucky it wasn’t worse, those fences are dangerous.

Oddly, it seems, dream and reality are beginning to blend by the conclusion of the poem. The person spoken to is almost accepting the terms of the “superhero” who is speaking. However, we can’t forget the title. The person spoken to resents the speaker. Why? Perhaps for no other reason than that the superhero is talking about what should remain unspoken.

If Whitmarsh’s poems are about the dramas that result when our unspoken fantasy lives break in and distance us from our real lives, these unspoken fantasies are also the source of what drives us to need each other or what makes us interesting or even who we are. One poem says it’s

Better, maybe, to let the guilt metastasize
than to cancel by good intent
any chance to surprise.

A couplet says,

Everything weak in us survives. It’s meant to.
If not, not a day would go by where I’d want you.

This couplet is from a poem titled “Three Curses.” The implication is that this is a curse, that our weakness is what drives us to want others, to desire. It is also what creates our fantasies and the distances between us. Or as Whitmarsh says in another poem, “One begins ever after and ends upon a time.”

It is a wonderful debut collection, inventive in its forms, from villanelles, triolets, and ghazels to prose poems and all handled with a casual fluency. He writes with compressed intensity; only a handful of his poems are longer than half a page. But all glitter like well-cut gems.