Il faut être toujours ivre...De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à
votre guise. Mais
enivrez-vous. [One must be always drunk. With wine, poetry or virtue, as you
choose. But get drunk.]
—Charles Baudelaire, “Enivrez-vous” (“Get Drunk”)
hese are some random, tentative notes on poet Kim Addonizio. I haven’t
read everything Addonizio has published, so the notes are far from “inclusive.”
They are simply speculations from a reader who has enjoyed her work over the
years but who has never attempted a formal study of it..
There are lots of things Kim Addonizio doesn’t write about: the nature of language, betrayal, dishonor, politics, one’s ongoing relationship to God. In a Poetry Flash interview conducted by Leza Lowitz (Number 289, available at the Poetry Flash web site), Addonizio describes her themes as “love, death, suffering, desire...In a way that’s very narrow, but in another way what else is there: food?” 1/ She says she “had to learn where my territory was and how I could talk about it.” She feels she “hadn’t quite found” her “voice” in The Philosopher’s Club (1994) but found it in Tell Me (2000)—so I’ll concentrate on that book in these remarks. (I haven’t read the recent What is This Thing Called Love?) Addonizio adds, “Obviously, my art is not a very hermetic one.” She is not aristocratic like the “hermetic” H.D. but a working-class woman.
Her work seems fresh—“honest” is a word constantly used about
it—because women don’t usually write about what she writes about: the
culture of the bar and of alcoholism have seemed to be essentially male domains.
Kim Addonizio is not quite a female Charles Bukowski (one can hardly imagine
Bukowski attempting a pantoum or a sonnet) but, as in Bukowski, alcoholism—and
people in bars—are an essential feature of what she does. Whatever she may
“be” in fact, the persona of her performances is of a woman who’s
been through a lot: sexy, but knowing; flaunting herself in a sense—the “bad
girl” but also, we realize, the poet. (Hence the pantoums, sonnets—which,
incidentally, she often identifies as such.) One of her models is Kathy Acker,
who is a considerably “wilder,” far more “experimental”
writer than Addonizio. “There’s a kind of tension between something
that’s got a formal structure and the content I’m working with,”
Addonizio told Leza Lowitz; “I’m very attracted to formal verse
because it’s a way to put the brakes on the material”:
Actually, I think it fits my personality very well, since I’m somewhat
schizophrenic. I have a lot of chaos in me as well as a
great need for order and structure. Using set forms can be a way to
address that.
In Acker, the form itself is interesting—sometimes outrageous; in Addonizio, content is sometimes outrageous, but form is not. Even her work in free verse is careful, clear: it isn’t surprising that she should move towards “something that’s got a formal structure.” One also finds such tension in the great 19th-century French poet, Charles Baudelaire—indeed, one finds more of it there than in Addonizio’s work: Baudelaire’s Classical forms constantly play against his often deliberately shocking subject matter. In Addonizio the “shock” often comes simply from the fact that a woman is saying such things:
Those men I fucked when I was drunk,
I can't even see their faces anymore.
Or the shape of their hands, hard
bones of their hips knocking against me,
curve of an ass or shoulder. Whatever
I tasted as they slid over me, nameless,
whatever words they tongued into me,
I don't have them. What I have
are the bars I met them in, the sweat
on a glass of beer, the dense granules of red
or blue light sifting toward me, sharp swell
of music....
("One-Night Stands")
What if a man had written those words about women? What would we think of him? Asked about the various Star Trek episodes by a fan, star William Shatner replied, “What I remember is the girls.” Addonizio remembers the bars. What if a man had written this:
It feels so good to shoot a gun,
to stand with your legs apart
holding a nine millimeter in both hands
aiming at something that can't run.
Over and over I rip holes
in the paper target clamped to its hanger....
("Target")
If, say, Mark Doty had produced that passage, I doubt that most readers would get past the opening couple of lines. In Addonizio, it’s acceptable, even
interesting. Those “male” themes which would be suspect in the hands
of male writers are fresh, even “honest” coming from a woman—especially
a woman like Addonizio, who is presumably “open” to experiences
such as shooting guns and casual sex. A man being “honest” in that
way would stir up a hornet’s nest; people are not interested in that
kind of “honesty” coming from a man. Indeed, the lines would be
problematical even if we were to understand that the author, though a woman,
was a Lesbian; Addonizio is not only deliberately a “woman” in her
work: she is deliberately a heterosexual woman. She is not a “nice girl”
but the “bad girl” nice girls envy. Of course we understand that
she is also “a poet”—someone who teaches classes and has co-authored
“a guide to the pleasures of writing poetry,” a book whose title
sounds like gentility in extremis: The Poet’s Companion. (One can’t
imagine Baudelaire or Bukowski producing a book with such a title.) The challenge
of the “bad girl” persona is considerably modified by the appearance
of the “poet” persona: we can say, She’s not self-destructive,
she’s just exploring the “dark side.” But perhaps, like Baudelaire,
she really is self-destructive. Many of Addonizio’s long lines have a
tendency to go on, to refuse to stop where we might expect a period but to continue
into a new phrase and then another—as if, were she to stop, she would disappear
or die or fade into despair:
There's a bird crying outside, or maybe calling, anyway it goes
on and on
without stopping, so I begin to think it's my bird, my insistent
I, I, I that today is so trapped by some nameless but still relentless
longing
that I can't get any further than this, one note clicking metronomically
in the afternoon silence, measuring out some possible melody
I can't begin to learn.
("The Singing")
Even her jokes circle around despair: “Two losers stand on a corner. / One turns to the other and says, Why did our love end?”(“Ha”)
Addonizio’s poems are indeed “not...very hermetic”; they are not very “mystical” either, not about ego loss, as Charles Olson’s are. Rather, they are deliberate affirmations of “love, death, suffering, desire,” of what she calls in a moment of genuine honesty “the beautiful, arrogant ego refusing to disappear”(“The Singing”):
How many days
are left of my life, how much does it matter if I manage to say
one true thing about it—how often have I tried, how often
failed and fallen into depression?
("The Numbers")
I,I,I. 2/
The limitations of this stance mean that a good deal of her work, fine as it is, is spent complaining about various affronts to the ego. Poor me. Look at what happened to me. Addonizio’s “stark mirrors of self-examination” (Billy Collins’ phrase) are often more like self-pity than they are like problematical confrontations with selfhood. Tell Me contains little joy but a considerable amount of kvetching: “do you know how fast it goes”; “the grief / that’s coming”; “the rain / relentless against the windows when will it stop oh when” (not one of Addonizio’s better lines).
Tell Me follows the poet through her doomed marriage and subsequent
divorce. In the concluding section of the book she finds a “new lover”
with whom she has a momentarily ecstatic relationship:
You [a substitute for "I"] come so intensely with your new lover
you wonder if you've turned
into someone else. Maybe an alien
has taken over your body
in order to experience the good life
here on earth....
("Aliens")
But, predictably, the new lover turns out to be as self-destructive as Addonizio herself—and in the same mode of self-destructiveness:
She sees how he ruins his own beauty,
how he craves the gold pour of rum into the glass
with its single cube of ice, its splash of red juice....
("The Witness")
:Cf. Charles Bukowski.
Addonizio’s constant complaining—detailed affronts to the poet’s ego—begins to wear on the reader. At times these affronts are used as an excuse for the poet’s drinking. Here, she heads for “the saddest bar in
the world, filled / with painted clowns and a few drunks”—lines which
sound like they belong in a Country-and-Western song:
the owner had passed out
in a booth, covered by his coat, his girlfriend was working
and said The usual, right? and I couldn't say a word
except Please, and I took a stool and drank
what she served and served and served.
("Beginning With His Body and
Ending in a Small Town")
If Tell Me has moments of egocentric self-assertion—
I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how fucking good I look
("For Desire")—
it also has the necessarily accompanying moments of fear, doubt, self-loathing: “Aren’t you a dog anyway, / always groveling for love and begging to be petted?” (“Good Girl”). Indeed, the theme of “garbage”—and of the self as garbage—is important to the book; the “unpoetic” word “stink” recurs (“Garbage,” “Night of the Living, Night of the Dead,” “Generations,” “For Desire”).
The poet’s angst is both existential and amorous. She writes of her
childhood,
Then, I'd believed in God; I would talk to Him
half the night sometimes, knowing
He was there, in heaven, just above the ceiling of my parents'
room.
But now there was no one.
("The Promise")
But she also writes of an ex lover,
I'm still
seeing his face the night it closed
to me forever like a failed business....
("Beginning With His Body and
Ending in a Small Town")
“God” is, evidently, still another of the unsatisfactory lovers who desert Addonizio.
The most famous stage direction in Shakespeare’s works occurs in the third act of The Winter’s Tale: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” There are many dead male poets about whom one thinks, “Exit, pursued by a bar.” Kim Addonizio has bravely entered that alcoholic literary terrain and opened the territory to women. Naturally, the experience has its comic elements, its self-destructive elements, its many self-pitying elements (“And I thought / the marriage would never end”), even its androgynous elements. Here, as often, “you” is a substitute for the author’s omnipresent “I”:
You remember the hardness of their bellies,
the soft line of hair that swirls down
toward the cock, the look of each one
that entered you and then withdrew, or lay
quietly inside awhile longer before slipping
away like a girl sneaking out in the middle
of the night, high heels dangling from one hand
as her stockinged feet drew sparks from the rug.
("Getting Older")
That passage is one of the most remarkable in the book.
The kinds of moments Addonizio celebrates in poems like “Getting Older” are ambiguous, occasionally ecstatic, and finally unsatisfactory. They are, however, not only what this poet has “instead of God,” as Hemingway said: they are what she has instead of community, what she has instead of commitment, what she has instead of the bourgeois assurance of the Good Life—which is perhaps the primary theme of her work:
Sometimes it's enough just to say
their names like a rosary, ordinary names
linked by nothing but the fact
that they belong to men who loved you. And finally
you depend on that, you pray it's enough
to last, if it has to, the rest of your life.
("Getting Older")
Conservative formally, flirting with self-destruction, bitter, funny, elegant, often despairing but full of energy—and issuing in teaching!—Kim Addonizio’s works are not a brave banner leading us into sheer possibility but simultaneously a look at what may be a genuine abyss and, in their instructive mode, a beginner’s guide for writers attempting to produce a poem. The combination seems likely only in today’s world of relentlessly upbeat, tender-hearted workshops (someone complained to me that Jane Hirshfield had “made her cry”) and poetry not as vision but as personal angst. 3/
1. There is, possibly, joy. And insofar as alcohol can be
considered “food,” she does indeed write about that subject.
2. There is a tender piece, “Mermaid,” which is addressed to the poet’s 15-year-old daughter—but the poet’s daughter is in many ways simply an extension of herself. The men in Tell Me are rather shadowy figures—versions perhaps of Addonizio’s alcoholic father. Addonizio points out to Leza Lowitz that “The Revered Poet Instructs Her Students on the Importance of Revision” is a persona poem about someone other than herself when Lowitz mistakes the speaker for Addonizio. Lowitz’s mistake is quite understandable, however, and I expect that most readers would make it.
3. Tell Me contains a less than generous
assessment of one set of the poet’s students—beginning writers:
my wretched
poetry class—
most of the students were lithium-dosed, or alcoholic, sprung for
the evening from cheap rooms
in the seedier part of downtown, living on state checks, nourished
by a belief in their latent genius,
which they were sure I would discover. They were desperate to
publish, though criminally indifferent
to actual poetry.
(“The Embers”)