Carolyn Forché, Blue Hour
(Harper/Collins)

Jack Foley

      I have read through it twice now, and I wish I liked it more than I do. Forché’s wonderful anthology, Against Forgetting, might well qualify as “brilliant,” but that is hardly true of these poems. This is “Curfew” in its entirety:

Curfew

for Sean

The curfew was as long as anyone could remember
Certainty’s tent was pulled from its little stakes
It was better not to speak any language
                         There was a man cloaked in doves, there was chandelier music

The city, translucent, shattered but did not disappear
Between the no-longer and the still-to-come
The child asked if the bones in the wall
Belonged to the lights in the tunnel
Yes, I said, and the stars nailed shut his heaven

      Poor kid. That isn’t dreadful, but it isn’t very good either. Is there anything in the least “new” about that poem? The word “language” shows up in it--and it’s a kind of wink to the reader. With the considerable success (both academic and non academic) of John Ashbery’s work and the work of various “language” poets, what began as an “experimental” movement--a function of the world of small press--has become something quite different. Here, the “experimental” is not an attempt to storm the barricades of the Absolute: rather, it is simply a style, a manner, something anyone can “do” in order to achieve certain “effects.” Blue Hour begins with a quotation from Martin Buber. “These moments are immortal,” writes Buber--hardly a modest claim for Forché’s poetry to be implicitly making!--“and most transitory of all”: 

no content may be secured from them....Beams of their power stream into the ordered world and dissolve it again and again.

      Despite Forché’s disclaimer, there is plenty of “content” to these poems. They are obviously an attempt to write poems--that is their “content”--and particularly poems that sound just like a lot of other poems published over the past twenty or thirty years. There is no harm, of course, in Forché’s “wanting to do it too” but it does not make for particularly interesting or “brilliant” writing. And there are, in Blue Hour’s attempt to stun us with Significance, dreadful moments: lines like “Horses were turned loose in the child’s sorrow” and “Wings slap along the wall, and in the hardened owl dung, crickets glint” and “so crowded does the too prosperous city become” (can you imagine that showing up in your morning newspaper?) or passages like

We have our veiled memory of running from police

dogs through a blossoming orchard, and another

Of not escaping them. That was--ago--(a lifetime)

      I take it that the arrangement of “That was--ago--(a lifetime)” is an attempt to disguise the line’s utterly banal sentiment: “That was a lifetime ago.” “On Earth,” the long poem particularly recommended by no fewer than two of the blurbs on the back of the book, structures itself via the alphabet. (Ron Silliman’s great project is called The Alphabet.) Forché writes a great many lines beginning with a, then a great many lines beginning with b, then a great many lines beginning with c, and on through the alphabet, ending with z. (The second words of the lines are alphabetized as well, so that “a burnt room strewn with toy tanks” is followed by “a century passing through it” and, a few lines later, “a desire to live as long as the world itself.”) There are only eleven lines for g, only four for j (two in French), only three for k, but she hits her stride again with t, which goes on for several pages, as does w. X has only one line (“x does not equal”--a play upon the world of mathematics), y has eighteen, and z, which ends the poem, only one: “zero.” * Again, the writing is not dreadful. Some of it is even rather good:

 your hand awkward between us in the absence of love

your heart in the guise of mysterious words
your light narrow coffin
your mother waving goodbye in the flames
your notebooks, the sorrow of ink

      But it all falls apart if we put it next to almost any passage from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons:

 A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.

      That kind of energy--bordering on madness--is genuinely “experimental,” and it is nowhere to be found in Forché’s deliberate, careful, derivative, small book.

      Blue Hour is perhaps part of some necessary development of Carolyn Forché’s spirit. One hopes it is. The book will probably sell, even at $24.95. There may even be people who believe the extravagant claims made by Robert Boyers on the book’s flap:

 Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called “the [lost] presence beyond appearance.” The longest poem, ‘On Earth,’ is a transcription of mind passing from life into death....

      The voice we hear in Blue Hour is a voice both very young and very old. It belongs to someone who has seen everything and who strives imperfectly, desperately, to be equal to what she has seen. The hunger to know is matched here by a desire to be new, totally without cynicism, open to the shocks of experience as if perpetually for the first time, though unillusioned, wise beyond any possible taint of a false or assumed innocence.

       Perhaps Boyers is right, but I tend to read his statement as an intense wish--what Freud said dreams were.

* Robert Boyers writes that “On Earth” is “in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns.” The combination of Gnosticism and experimentalism suggests Brenda Hillman’s work.

Jack Foley