he oddly-named book I'm reviewing has no publisher indicated so I will assume that it made its way into the world W.B.O.P.—without benefit of publisher. This is no shame and is even in the great tradition of Walt Whitman, whose very odd verse would have had considerable difficulty finding anyone willing to take it. As Naylor's title suggests, his book is at least as odd as Whitman's and, like Whitman's, carries with it a burden of religiosity.

In the introductory remarks to another collection, Fatted Laugh of the Frolicking Calf—once the calf finds out why it is being fattened, it may not be laughing much!—Naylor makes some dubious though amusing remarks about the nature of poetry. "It is a misconception or a misconstruence the scriptor, escritor, scribe, that is, authors to literary works, do so for the escape or pleasure of their readership or audience. It could not be further from the truth...." Art, Naylor goes on, "is for a serious purpose or intent, with a deadly serious mission...Seen as infidel now one who seek [sic] nothing less than the conversion of the heathenistic idolaters of consumption to a return to the holier than thou ways of moral stricture and proper living." "There is within the canon of the Western Tradition," he continues,

a work known as the Holy Writ. It is one of the most revered and beloved of all its works of literature, not one word of which, not one dotted I or crossed T which was not set down in deadly seriousness. It was not written with the intent or even claim of fantasy or pleasure.

Right.

Happily, Naylor's beliefs about Art—and his utter disconnect between "pleasure" and "seriousness"—do not extend to his actual writing. Wallace Stevens wrote of "The Supreme Fiction": "It must give pleasure." Naylor's writing gives pleasure (thank you, Jesus!) even in its oddity and its deliberate thrust towards "deep seriousness."

Both The Tether and the Scale: Shriker's Horation—not exactly a "sexy" title—and Fatted Laugh of the Frolicking Calf were sent to me by a friend of the author's. This friend, who is a fine poet herself, is convinced of Naylor's "genius." I'm not quite so convinced—Fatted Laugh of the Frolicking Calf seems to me to be full of passages in which Homer is definitely nodding—but I do find myself constantly going back to The Tether and the Scale("tether" is a pun on "feather": Naylor is thinking of Maat's feather and scale—the theme of "Justicia" runs throughout the book). The "prefatory pretext" to The Tether and the Scale is playful, charming—at some distance from the author's intended "deadly seriousness." It takes letters of the Greek alphabet and turns them into English phrases. "ALPHA/A," for instance, becomes "A PAL AH!"—a fitting and hopeful designation of a new reader. The poem ends with "OMEGA/Y—O GAY ME!" Whether this is meant as an autobiographical admission is not clear. (A poet who uses "'gainst" may well be harkening back to earlier uses of "gay." What is the relationship of "gay" to "seriousness"?)

The actual opening poem of The Tether and the Scale—as opposed to its "prefatory pretext"—is an excellent one, though you have to get used to the fact that Naylor determinedly Capitalizes Every Word:

 HOUR OF GENESIS/IN PRAISE OF A VASE
 (A DEDICATION TO FALCONS EVERYWHERE)
 (TO OUR TEACHERS, THE FALCON HEARS THE FALCONER)

 It Stood In The Table's Middle
 Not Unlike A Sword In Stone

 A Women's Keepsake
 The Old Man's Ash Tray
 The Children Put Flowers In
 The Cat Rubbed Against

 Dignified Center At Dinner
 A Simple Elegance
 Neither Greek Mosaic Or Victorian Glass
 Ceramic Folk Song Americaine

 An Earthquake Shook
 Cracked And Broke To Bits
 To The Floor Crashed
 Glue Could Not Fix
 For the Dust Bin

 A Piece of Time
 A Place Of Honor
 A Silent Remind
 Testimony To Selfless Service
 In Absence, Hardly Remembered
 Once All's Attention Held

 Under An Old Hutch
 Years Later Found
 In Sweeping Dust
 The Round Base

 It Said, Inscribed
 A Tear To Eye
 A Destiny Not Evade
 Date To Uncertain Fate
 Class of 1978

 Found It's [sic]Way Home
 Given A Handsome Place
 In The Momento Case
 And Brought Out
 From Time To Time

Roger Ernesto Naylor, AKA REN (Falcon)/O'Casey II
Foothill Class of 1978, Pleasanton, California
On the Occasion Of The 25th Reunion/Saturday, August 9, 2003
(Opening, Page 1, Section X)

Naylor tends to give the reader more than s/he needs to know about the specifics of exactly when and where the poem was written; as it happens, this one was written on my birthday in 2003. In Naylor's world, this is by no means necessarily a coincidence. There are suggestions not only of Egyptian myth—a major theme of the book—but of the Kabbalah. Several references to the Tetragrammaton—JHVH—are made. The mystical sense that everything is relevant is not absent from Naylor's work.

As for the poem itself: apart from the mistake in spelling ("Momento" should be "Memento") and the grammatical error ("It's" should be "Its"), "HOUR OF GENESIS/IN PRAISE OF A VASE" seems to me quite lovely. It reminds me a little of Thomas Gray's "On the Death of a Favorite Cat" or of certain passages of John Donne or Andrew Marvel. (Naylor seems to have studied the Metaphysical poets: he suggests that his initials, R.E.N., might be an abbreviation of "Renaissance.")

Despite the reference to Yeats' "The Second Coming" at the beginning of "HOUR OF GENESIS," Modernism is nowhere to be found in The Tether and the Scale: Shriker's Horation. Another artist Naylor calls to mind is A.G. Rizzoli ("architect of magnificent visions"); like Rizzoli's, Naylor's sources are the Bible, Shakespeare, anthologized poets such as Yeats or the Metaphysicals. Like Rizzoli, he is a somewhat old-fashioned "visionary." Unlike many contemporary writers, he does not parade his knowledge of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, etc. Rather the opposite: he shows no awareness of them at all. This is not to say that Naylor has not read these writers—only that their work is not in the least reflected in his.

Naylor clearly regards his poetry as devotional (Christian); he believes it encourages—as he puts it—"the conversion of the heathenistic idolaters of consumption to a return to the holier than thou ways of moral stricture and proper living." That statement deliberately combines an attack on consumerism ( Naylor would undoubtedly find many people to agree with him) and an attack on "heathenism" (Naylor would undoubtedly find far fewer people to agree with him). As the passage indicates, Naylor's poetry has a political edge: one of the lines in The Tether and the Scale is "Murder A Democracy, Reaganism—Democricide"; in Fatted Laugh of the Frolicking Calf he asserts that "The Only Good War Is No War, The Only Bad Peace Is No Peace."

Though Naylor is capable of what is almost children's verse—

 Peter, Peter, Cotton Tail, Coming Down The Bunny Trail
 Peter, Peter, Cotton Tail, Over Hill And Over Dale
 Peter, Peter, Cotton Tail, With Basket Of Grandsire's Kale
 Peter, Peter, Cotton Tail, Dreaming Of Cakes, Dreaming Of Ale
 Peter, Peter, Cotton Tail, Caught Up In A Sudden Gale
 Peter, Peter, Cotton Tail, Began To Quake, Began To Quail—
 

the general tone of the poems in The Tether and the Scale tends towards the apocalyptic:

 Cursed Are The Mortifiers Of Flesh, For Theirs Shall Be The Roasting Depths
 Cursed Are The Rejoicers After Death, Death Shall Destroy With Much Distress
 Cursed Are The Mighty, Of Whom All Inheritance Deprive Their Crimes Indite
 Cursed Are the Wicked, Fattened And Drunk On Iniquities, Lack Of Love Ever Afflict
 Cursed Are The Merciless, By Their Cruelties Their Eternal Condemn Torments
 Cursed Are The Warmongers, They Shall Be Called With Scorn The Spawn Of Satan....

There is little in the way of "description" or even of what we think of as "imagery" (as in Williams' "so much depends / upon...."). What there is instead is a passionate rhetorical energy which can veer dizzyingly from highly "serious" matters ("The Last Sayer's Plagues On The Canaille Preyers") to folk song:

 One, Two, Shoo, Fly, Shoo
 Three, Four, Storm The Door....

I don't think that "conversion" is likely to be the result of such odd, quirky, even frightening verse—but the ride through Naylor's complex consciousness is well worth the effort. He is certainly an original, and originals are notoriously difficult to classify. Even his name is no settled matter. "Roger," Naylor writes,

Goes By Several Signatures, The Initials Of His Name A Shortened Form He Fancies Of The Word "Renaissance," And Recently Retired The Self-Designated Title, REN/Le Canna Pollex, Under Which He Published His Work During 2002. He Now Goes By The Nome [sic] De Plume, REN(Falcon)/O'Casey II, A John Hancock He Derives From His Highschool Mascot, The Falcon, Combined With The Honorary Adoption Of The Stockton-Identified, And Supposed Protagonist And Hero Of Ernest Lawrence Thayer's 1888 Poem About "Mudville" (Stockton), Casey, Of Casey At The Bat.

May "Casey II" do better than his illustrious but ill-famed predecessor!

The slightly later sequence, Fatted Laugh of the Frolicking Calf, has its moments but seems to me less successful than The Tether and the Scale. Stanzas like

 Mithridatum And Dragon Water's Cure
 Sun God's Persian Arrow Hits Its Mark
 Joy A New Born's Invicible [sic] Lure
 Bull's Blood Mead Immortal Hark

are not likely to add to Naylor's reputation.

The great Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771) wrote, "What makes men happy is liking what they have to do. This is a principle on which society is not founded." (Reading such sentiments, Helvétius's admiring contemporary Voltaire advised the author to leave France immediately!) I think Naylor's "deep seriousness" is a principle on which literature is not founded—though this is not to say that literature is in any way trivial or that it lacks "deep seriousness." Matthew Arnold would probably have agreed with Naylor's sentiment, but I think it would be more profitable for this writer to study another eminent Victorian, Oscar Wilde. Wilde wrote, famously and with an obvious degree of truth: "All art is quite useless."

In the meantime, The Tether and the Scale: Shriker's Horation is certainly something to read.

© Jack Foley