Foley's Books | Octavo Summer 2002 | The Alsop Review
The Latest APRJack Foley
...has a
picture of Jane Hirshfield on the cover. Inside, it features fifteen of
her poems and an essay, “Thoreau’s Hound: On Hiddenness.” I rather
like the opening poem, “Theology,” but the very next has these
unintentionally funny lines: The rain comes to
it hard or less hard, but
knows nothing of hesitation’s rake-toothed debate. What in the
world is that supposed to mean? Sometimes it rains “hard”; sometimes
it rains “less hard.” True enough. (Sometimes, one might add, it
fails to rain at all.) If these lines weren’t by a poet of some
reputation, would they have been published in so widely-read and
influential a periodical as APR? What exactly is
“hesitation’s rake-toothed debate”? Are we talking the Hamlet
problem here? I think in
fact the lines mean very little. People have consciousness, make
choices, and so they sometimes hesitate in making these choices. “The
rain,” on the other hand, operates in a very different mode of
causality. That’s perfectly true. But there is an oracular quality to
Hirshfield’s language (“comes to it hard or less hard,”
“hesitation’s rake-toothed debate”) which seems to insist that
that truth has more significance than in fact it does. These poems are
constantly winking at you, telling you, “I’m saying this, but really
I mean something different and much more profound.” “A fidelity to
the ungraspable lies at the very root of being,” Hirshfield writes in
her essay. The lines quoted above seem to be a perfectly “graspable”
assertion trying hard to assure us that it is ungraspable.
Indeed, the opening passage of APR’s selection sounds like a
kinder, gentler John Ashbery--minus Ashbery’s ever-present
irony: If the
flies did not hurry themselves to the window they’d
still die somewhere. Other
creatures choose the other dimension: to
slip into a
thicket, swim into the shaded, undercut part of
the stream. My
dog would make her tennis ball disappear.... “I
Imagine Myself In Time,” on the other hand, reads like one of Ern
Malley’s lesser efforts: I
imagine myself in time looking back on myself-- this
self, this morning, drinking
her coffee on the first day of a new year and once
again almost unable to move her pen through the iron air. Perplexed
by my life as Midas was in his world of sudden metal, surprised
that it was not as he’d expected, what he had asked. One might say of this poem what Tallulah Bankhead said of Maeterlinck’s Aglavaine and Selysette: there is not more but less than meets the eye. Jane Hirshfield is a real person who actually exists and who writes
poetry with a serious intention. Yet suppose for just a moment that she
were, like Ern Malley, a hoax created to expose the stupidity,
pretentiousness and lack of humor of the reader. How would that affect our
response to lines like these? What can
I do with these thoughts, given me
as a dog is given its flock? Or
perhaps it is the reverse-- Wouldn’t we find them funny (which is not what the poet expects us to find them)?
Jane Hirshfield is a poet of considerable reputation, and I doubt that
what I am writing here will have any effect on that fact. Certainly what
I’m writing may be genuinely unfair. Yet, as I read through APR,
I couldn’t help thinking, “Isn’t there anyone to say something about
this kind of writing, with its immense pomposity and its utter lack of
humor? Is the Empress decked out to the nines--as she appears in the cover
photo--or is she naked?” “Mystery,” writes Hirshfield, “secrecy,
camouflage, silence, stillness, shadow, distance, opacity, withdrawal,
namelessness, uncertainty, shyness, lying, erasure, encryption, enigma,
absence, darkness--these are some of the kaleidoscope names of the hidden,
each carrying its own description of something whose essence it is to
elude describing.” I ended with a kind of epigram: there is so much
pseudo profundity in these poems that if you pseudo fell into one of them
you would be pseudo falling forever.
© Jack
Foley, May 2002 |