Ivan Arguelles, Enigma and Variations:
Paradise Is Persian For Park (Pantograph Press, 1995)

Jack Foley

Enigma and Variations: Paradise is Persian for Park is the latest installment of Ivan Argüelles' amazing, ongoing work, Pantograph. Mythic, parodic, funny, at once tragic and hilarious, Argüelles" verse is impossible to categorize. To be unaware of it is to be unaware of one of the deepest current possibilities of American poetry. Its antecedents are Pound (The Pisan Cantos), Joyce (Finnegans Wake), Baudelaire, late Hölderlin, and the darker, wilder Spanish Surrealists—Vallejo above all. But Madonna and a John Denver song show up here as well. This book is mind at the absolute brink, "with no excuse," a state in which anything can happen. Fueled by enormous learning (Argüelles is by trade a librarian) and orchestrated by one of the finest musical sensibilities in contemporary poetry, Enigma and Variations has the immediacy of a cry in the street. In the midst of an appalling political event, the United States' invasion of the Persian Gulf, History, like Blake's Eternal Hell, revives itself. But the awakening is pure nightmare. Argüelles' protagonist is never certain whether he is alive or dead, whether he is himself or someone else: "I am at war." His poem is at once a deep reaction to current events and a transformation of them as step by step the poet struggles to build his "noetic city," "the core of all desire." What is paradise? How did we lose it? Why do we go to war? What is desire in "a world of erroneous values"? What is "light"? What is "breath"? The poem offers no answers. Rather, it transforms our desire to know into ceaseless revelations of sensibility. There is really nothing like it in contemporary writing. Byron at his fiercest is among us again. Enigma and Variations is endless, marvelous vaudeville. Argüelles writes, "this is not a representation of madness / but madness itself." And again: "armageddon is no fiction." And again: "I'm gone, baby, I'm gone and see no way out."

Jack Foley