Ivan Argüelles, Greatest Hits 1978-2000
(Pudding House Publications,
Greatest Hits Series #27)
Jack Foley
What is needed is a substantial "Selected Poems of Ivan Argüelles"--a book which will indicate something of the accomplishment of this amazing, sixty-one-year-old American poet. What we have in this Pudding House Publication of twelve short poems is a candy box, a soupcon--nothing more. Argüelles is the author of some masterful long poems and gains some of his best effects through length--the new "Madonna Septet" is an amazing example--but you wouldn't know that from what Pudding House puts forward. In addition, one can dispute whether these twelve poems are in fact Argüelles's "greatest": he has written quite a number of very fine individual poems.
On the other hand, for those who like candy, here is some of the best--not the best of Argüelles but the best of what is currently being produced in America. The poems stretch back to Argüelles's first book, "Instamatic Reconditioning" (1978) and forward to "Looking for Mary Lou," which won the 1989 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Here is Argüelles's Charles Manson:
I looked inside my breast and there was
nothing but a large torn piece of sky
nothing but a large torn piece of sky
"when morning becomes a strange hospital"
they are driving ministry of food through me
I am a cannibal
And here is his Elvis:
enormous decay ten thousand years on
cat-fevered impulsive flyer dreaming
past the raft's blurred horizon
am I or am I not going to supersede myself?
pink cadillac of the western world
blue suede jail-break association
electric garbage dixie-fried you name it
I got it all purpose ball-bearing truck
diesel rolling through hot memories nights
gospel honey and set on the spit my baby's
on that long black train and gone aint
nothing gonna stop me....
Such works are not quite dramatic monologues--though they have something of the feeling of dramatic monologues. Rather, they are Argüelles momentarily and partially taking on the identity of someone whose life he recognizes as mirroring his own and whose character liberates something in this author's complex psyche. Often such figures are outlaws of one kind or another--outsiders, pariahs, figures of the poet.
Though there are always a number of strands and complexities in Argüelles's work, his basic theme is how it feels to have a mind like Argüelles's--the burdens of genius. He himself has cited Baudelaire as a parallel instance, but in a way Argüelles is less Baudelaire than he is a Modernist, Surrealist Poe (whom Baudelaire translated). Argüelles is an American writer who leans to the dark side and whose primary interest is not in character or story but in the permutations of the author's own consciousness. At times one feels that Argüelles is as amazed by his work and the turns it takes as we are. His Muse is a figure he calls "‘that' goddess": she shows up here in "The Death of Stalin" and eventually undergoes an astonishing transmutation into the pop star, Madonna in "Madonna Septet."
Unfortunately, "Greatest Hits" has nothing of the density and complexity of more recent writing such as this, from "Madonna Septet":
labyrinth of hindu mytho- links to the
heavenly when language oscillates in funct-
topological assertions that celestial entity
on call please register nome numbing
falsifi- thology ad maiorem gloriam
her divinity was described as pro choice
a taxi driver with nowhere to go but
Srinagar or Allahabad some place you know "hot"
where you dont have to "think"
just put something on the tape deck
and FREEZE
What this book offers is vintage Argüelles. Every poem is a winner, but I wish it were a lengthy "Selected"--something that might acknowledge the achievement of the epic "Pantograph" and the driven, obsessive "Madonna Septet" along with the early work. But there are wonderful poems here, and I guess it will have to do Until the Real Thing Comes Along.
Jack Foley
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