What Is a Poem?
By Christopher Bernard
Writing it:
a moment of pity, plus a little skill, plus an absolutely absurd pride.
Reading it:
echoes, echoes, echoes of the dead.
*
Words and cats:
proud seductive minds.
Writing it,
like herding cats
who just happen to be on fire.
Reading it,
on the other hand,
like listening in on a convention
of drunken, but supremely eloquent, dogs.
Bold Artificer
Caligulan
Poems by Ernest Hilbert
Measure Press
80 pages
$20.00
A review by Christopher Bernard
Ernest Hilbert
There are books of poetry that, if only readers could be induced to pick them up, might change their minds for good about the supposed incomprehensibility, preciousness and irrelevance of modern poetry. Ernest Hilbert’s new collection, Caligulan, belongs to that rare class.
After his beautifully rendered Sixty Sonnets and the eloquent All of You on the Good Earth comes this richly wrought (if curiously titled—more on that below) new collection. Hilbert is a classicist in the finest sense of the term: he has a firm grip on the formal orders that have dominated the great tradition of Anglophone verse from the skalds of Beowulf and the Pearl Poet to the tight gems of darkness of Thomas Hardy, and he uses them to write poems that ring with very contemporary truths. A skillful artificer of forms of verse that have sometimes gone wanting or are unjustifiably neglected or despised after the earthquakes of modernism, he is afraid of neither tight meter nor demanding rhymes: he proves there is nothing whatsoever anachronistic about well-tooled verse; the rage of authenticity can speak as sharply in a sonnet as in a calligramme.
The book is divided into four sections, named after the seasons, beginning with Summer. The landscape is mostly North Atlantic, eastern seaboard, in the countrysides of New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania and the city streets of Philadelphia, where Hilbert lives, and which he knows intimately; he throws out the name “Atlantica” in a poem of that title: a place half mythic, half real, torn in the perpetual strife between love and time.
Hilbert has a strong feeling, expressed with great skill, for this “scape” and its denizens – not only human, but the animals and birds that squirrel in among the human detritus. It’s a world full of life:
“Daffodyls, two of them, astonish me
Ambushing me from winter’s nowhere …”
“A thin rain fastens banks of last night’s snow
With ice …”
“The gull pulls bags from trash and drags them clear.
He’s big as a cat, a blur of snow and soot.”
Cats are among the book’s household gods:
“She stalks the May yard,
… moves
Like a shadow …
… a helpless curl
Of fur in her jaws.”
One dies, another lives; and another rules:
“Ospreys orbit rule here, ruling as lords
Their drowned domains.”
A taxidermized moose rises in a museum diorama:
“You still startle, filling half the false sky.”
And yet the central, not always welcome but inevitable figure is of human beings, the planet’s caught, lost invaders:
“It’s pitch dark and pissing down so hard
You see nothing but tearful shards of light.”
“Wind conveys a muffled tune from a truck
Up from a valley, and they make out
Eddie Money’s ‘Two Tickets to Paradise’ …”
“The ship is locked beneath frozen mountains.
It crunches by inches against white floes.”
“He’s stranded in a place remote and sunless …
…
Above him … lie
The archaic stars whose light still shapes the sky.”
The poet here—the “I” of the poem’s fantasy, which is always the poem’s truth—is immersed in the baroque world of things and meanings, a sympathetic (if also sometimes moping and self-absorbed) character, embattled (as we all are, which makes his struggles so like our own) with the shaggy monster of meaning and its opposite, the tough, shiny thing that stares up at us from the bottom of its absence, and that will not, paradoxically, leave us alone:
“… where is our monster, the one we thought
Would always be there somewhere, though hidden?”
as he puts in “Cryptid,” about a visit apparently to Loch Ness, in search of the fabled monster. Then he finds that the monstrous absence is precisely the human, is precisely himself:
“… I catch the shallow
Smudges of my face in the cabin window.”
We haunt the world between a presence we can never find and an absence we cannot accept.
The poems rock between the contemporary and the archaic, binding the modern and the ancient into an embossed shield against time, demonstrating how the old invests the new with a palpable presence, and the new is often merely the latest mask of the ancient, which finds a dented, dulled, coruscating glamorousness in such poems (of particular accomplishment) as “Dishwasher” and “Judgement.”
Some of the poems have an almost palpable feel to them, like finely worked objects you can weigh in your hand, or even smell:
“The man holds the flaccid, bulging wet
Shape up to shine in the sun a moment
Over the slobbering jaws, then drops it.”
This the result of the gelding of a horse. (A tiny preface, tucked away on the copyright page, states, with a kind of reticent irony, that the author “wishes his readers a few uncomfortable moments.” Well, he succeeds—but never without compensating us with an eloquence more memorable than the discomfort.)
So we come to the odd title, a coinage that is explained in two pages of faux lexicography at the start of the book: it is, of course, a qualifier meaning “like Caligula,” the vicious, half-mad Roman emperor, who presided over Rome in a period of supreme decadence (any parallels with contemporary America are, no doubt, entirely coincidental!) and notoriously named his horse as consul; except that here the word is taken to mean “illogical fear of disaster … constant worry for the safety of oneself … obsession with cruel and irrational behavior.” And there is a poem with the same title at the very end of “Autumn”: about a panic attack the poet suffers after an almost comic avalanche of petty but ominous disasters (rolling together, in a rococo goo, among other sleights to human dignity, tasteless television broadcasts, coffee withdrawal, a call from his bank, a crashing computer, and the curses of “Olympian Jupiter”), portending (though it “just hasn’t happened yet”) his own mortality.
Other poems sometimes suffer from the risks and harrowings of an excessive self-consciousness: the poems that forget the brooding “I” and clasp our attention undistractedly to their subject (“Mother’s Day,” “The Gelding,” “Penrose Diner,” with its admirable cinematic “zoom” and neat reversal of relations:
“The waitresses smell of fresh laundry
And menthol cigarettes, arrive with winks
Like busy nurses. All around is cement,
And there’s a hotel in a lot filled with debris.”)
often reach the reader most keenly.
Though a constant trembling of anguish informs many of these poems, like a quiet ostinato rumbling constantly in the bass, what is most notable is how the poet’s anxieties are, in the main, transmuted from personal spasms of what sometimes sometimes feels like merely neurotic terror into objects of great beauty, a beauty that transforms the anguish that generated them into victories, however temporary, of grace.
Hilbert tends to write in a kind of contemporary Augustan “high style,” which has the congenital, Miltonic problems he does not always avoid of over-portentousness and patchy magniloquence. There are related problems when a poet has made his commitment to strict meter and rhyme: an occasional strained and contrived phrase hammered into a line with an ugly pruning of articles and dislocated enjambment (you can sometimes hear the phrase suppressing a snarl at the pinch) so that the blamed thing will fit.
But more often, and on the whole, the strictness of the procrustean bed to which Hilbert has bound his verses is a strengthener – and then the tight rhymes and the enjambed lines sing.
The collection, growing in strength as it moves through the seasons, ending in the resurrecting life of a typically glorious Pennsylvania spring, concludes with what, for me, is its strongest poem, marshalling the poet’s strengths in a swell of quiet, deep, and endearing, eloquence: “Who Is He Dares Enter These My Woods?” a poem that evokes a spring morning in center city Philadelphia with great precision (having grown up there, I can attest to it) and a moment of joy and affection that is entirely winning, that made me feel, surprised and admiring and, strangely—or perhaps not so strangely—grateful.
_____
Christopher Bernard is author of The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs and Dangerous Stories for Boys. His latest book is the novel Voyage to a Phantom City. He is co-editor and poetry editor for the webzine Caveat Lector.
From the Nottingham Autism Research Team
An Ahumanist
By Christopher Bernard
“Who needs atheists?” he said. “ ‘We
do not believe in God’? Well, I
don’t b’lieve in your blessed humanity.
The sooner humans are wiped out,
the sooner the rest of us can rot
in peace.”
I was intrigued, if startled. Cool,
he looked, rational, serene.
He smiled wanly. But it was no joke
to him, I could see. Nor did he preen
himself on his intellect or heart,
his courage to face the monstrous worst.
“We are, to put it bluntly,
the condign damnable Nazis of the earth,
her Kozentrationlagers’ kommandants,
her curse.” He looked grimly
around at the rumpled bustling street.
The Hidden Presence
The Fire’s Journey
Volume 2: The Creation of Myself
By Eunice Odio
Translated by Keith Ekiss with Sonia P. Ticas and Mauicio Espinoza
Tavern Books
66 pages
$17.00
A review by Christopher Bernard
There is a compulsive uneasiness to being a poet in the contemporary world. He (or she) has little place in a society that only respects makers of goods or providers of services that can “turn a profit.”
But poetry has little place in a market economy; neither the work itself nor any way of presenting it can make enough money to provide a poet with even a modest living, let alone anything like a fortune for himself or his publisher. And, as we all know by now, if your creativity can’t leverage you, at the very least, a few million in investments, with a hundred mill in loans, for the transparency of a billion in mid-term prospect (a modest enough ambition in the world of globalized twenty-first century capitalism), what real value does it have?
Because to be a poet in the modern world means knowingly and deliberately to choose a life of almost indecent poverty, or at best a tight little corner in the dwindling middle class doing something that does not deprive the poet of the time, energy and emotional and intellectual freedom to make the poetry that gives his life meaning. Poets keep the wolf from the door by doing something—anything—else.
In even the recent past, the respectable poverty of the poet was mitigated by respect, even fame: the poet was the voice of his people, of their hopes, loves, defeats, victories, during the great period of nationalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The poet wrote his people’s love songs, laments, elegies, odes, satires, lampoons, manifestoes, gibes. People loved and admired their poets; they quoted favorite poems to themselves for pleasure and consolation. They found in poems the words they could not find for themselves.
As in any other year
each day the sun rose, it set.
Mothers, friends, partners, lovers,
after laughing at us for longer than we cared to remember,
vanished overnight.
Where they used to be now is a hole in the air.
The monarch butterflies move in mists of wings
across the plains between Canada and Mexico,
rain takes a stroll across parched California,
and the moon glows down on everything on the earth.
The snow lines the pockets of the mountains with rebukes
as sharp as memories of kitchens on winter mornings.
A crocus breaks through the whiteness, a small pink fist,
sleek as rebellion, calm, deceptively delicate,
wagging in the wind.
Your partner is ice, hollyhocks, poppies.
Your lover is a fox hiding under a felled cedar.
Your mother is the wind.
Every day the sun set, it rose.
_____
Christopher Bernard is author of The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs. His poetry can be read at The Bog of St. Philinte.
The Rude Mechs theater troupe
HEY AMERICA! STOP HITTING YOURSELF
Stop Hitting Yourself
Rude Mechs
Zellerbach Playhouse
November 19–22, 2015
A review by Christopher Bernard
Cal Performances brought Austin, Texas’s zany theater collective Rude Mechs to Berkeley for a weekend of their 2014 New York hit. And a hit it was, hitting me, at first silly, then awake, with its brainy provocations, savage wit, and the cruel tickle of truth.
The show is an inspired combination of a classic Hollywood musical, a pithy allegory on contemporary mores, sudden outbreaks of wacked-out dance routines, witty seductions into audience participation, moments of unexpected confessions by the cast, and a fable on the inner conflict, at the heart of American life, between today’s brutal culture of narcissism, rapacity and greed and ancient ideals of selfless love, kindness to neighbors, the sanctity of nature and the basic decency of the common man and woman.
Paris: Les attaques, et après
Le 13 novembre
La ville des lumières
cette nuit etait
une ville de douleur.
Sois calme, mon coeur.
Le sang de Paris
ne se fait pas
de pleurs.
Le 14 novembre
La Ville Lumière
cette nuit devenait
une ville de noirceur,
à l’aube,
une ville de desolation et douleur.
Sois calme, mon coeur.
Le sang de Paris
ne se fait pas de pleurs.
Le 15 novembre
La nuit tombait
sur la Ville Lumière,
le soleil levait
sur une ville de noirceur.
Sois brave, mon esprit. Sois calme, mon coeur.
Sous le drapeau de la desolation,
sous le rage de la douleur,
sous l’orage des oiseaux
dans le ciel de ce jour,
l’esprit monte au ciel
d’esperance and d’amour,
et le courage dit au terreur:
La France va te ruiner,
elle va te détruire, elle va t’ecraser,
elle va te laisser sur la terre désolée.
Le sang de Paris ne se fait pas de pleurs.
(English translation follows)