Repose
Adam Getty
Nightwood Editions, 2008
88 pages, $16.95
The Mechanical Bird
Asa Boxer
Véhicule Press, 2007
78 pages, $16.00
Gwendolyn MacEwen famously wrote that “Poetry has got nothing to do with poetry. Poetry is how the air goes green before thunder, is the sound you make when you come and why you live and how you bleed and the sound you make or don’t make when you die.” With such a statement, essentialist as it may seem, MacEwen foregrounded the vital role that sensory experience plays in the writing of poetry. Poems have ideas in them, research behind them, but if they remain purely intellectual, then such poems are as husks, perhaps virtuosic in form but dead from the gut down.
Adam Getty’s second collection, Repose, and Asa Boxer’s first book, The Mechanical Bird, are both manifestly concerned with poetic craft as necessary artifice. The crafting of poems, the poets demonstrate, can serve as a form of opposition to the deadening forces of production that define our lives in the 21st century.
Getty’s poems are as deeply lodged in his literary and scholarly syllabus as they are entrenched in the industrial stench of Hamilton, with its wreckages, steel mills and slaughterhouses. His poems reference Dante, Milton, Kafka, Lacan, Blake, Sappho, Lee, Adorno, Breton and Wordsworth; echoing lines from Thomas (“in my craft & sullen art”), Moritz, and the Bible. His facility for fusing world and text varies from heavy-handed disjunction to a sleek weaving of seemingly disparate threads, as with “Pender & Hamilton,” a poem reminiscent of Robinson Jeffers’ “The Loving Shepherdess,” in its first person characterization of a lonely yet curiously joyful individual who is tending flocks, “sheep/ and swine both. I love the little roads though:/ cemented, dirt, it doesn’t matter… No matter/ if even I am shut out. I love to turn/ and look upon the placid valley road.”
Similar to the aim of The Fugitives, a critical collective that emerged in the 1920s consisting of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and others, Getty’s primary goal appears to be to inscribe an opposition to the obvious but still sad fact that, as the jacket blurb notes, “employment is anything but a democratic process.” Thus, Getty’s deployment of traditional forms, prophetic rhetoric and classical allusions would appear to go hand in hand with his resistance to the desecrations of modernity, his desire to return to, or at least to retain the illusion of, a more gracious era, akin to the “wisp [that] remain[s] in light/ when water churns above [his] prow” in the book’s epilogue.
A smattering of poems in the collection powerfully rise to these exalted aims. Throughout “Comment on Blake’s Garden,” Getty counterposes the period and slant rhymes in his second and fourth lines with mostly perfect rhymes in the first and third lines to create an effective tension between the speaker’s physical chaining and mental sense of being free: “At Appleby no apples. hang./ you children playing here/ steel binds the limbs of men/ and rule. The clouds draw near.” This last stanza, with its verbal ambiguity in the word “hang,” which visually and literally becomes suspended without a clear referent, and the final dactylic hexameter lines that march to their ominous close, fuses Blake’s nightmares of Urizenic domination with contemporary fears of corporate control. Such a style is almost equally well employed in the poem “Hamilton,” a piece that also echoes Thomas’s “In my craft and sullen art,” each of the four stanzas beginning with “I step through each sullen street,” and evolving into images of eerily quiet factories, men who “slap their spouses” and a pavement that “jars the spine” with its irrevocable hardness.
“Poetics Essay” is an evocative piece too, though it sags in the middle with the dull cant of industrial panic: “The dollar’s rising too fast… the dollar’s too low.” Its depiction of the “grey men” who “run in circles” trying to increase production whirls in the mind like a painting of Adam Smith’s dreams as rendered by Hieronymous Bosch, while its repetition of the word “calm” at the beginning and the end of this piece – “Be calm, you said”; “You told me, be calm. I will not be calm” – shapes a sonorous portrait of one man’s autonomous struggles against the masses’ flailing for more more more. Digging even deeper into assembly-line horrors, “Reply to a Caseworker” shifts from steel mills to the slaughterhouse, and here, when Getty is drawing from personal incidents of endurance, he is at his most potent as a poet, the quintains taut, consonance bold in words like stuck/rankle/killing, as well as in the half rhymes at line ends like the first stanza’s smell/walls/while/sprawl. Assonantal slashes of pairings such as brutal/pulled and stinking/pink also contribute to the felt violence of the subject matter, both the hog slaughtering and the human numbness to animal suffering.
However, with the introduction of the “(Croatian I think)” woman in the last two stanzas, Getty sidesteps his own vital experience of this dirty job, substituting the woman’s rather vague reaction to it. A reaction which, detached from the previous scene, the speaker is incapable of imaginatively inhabiting and thus connecting his readers to. In fact, apart from the intriguing opening to the poem “Boundary,” which entices the ear with its Aristotelian leap from presence to absence, “O Jennifer, there is no Jennifer,” every time Getty inserts a female character – usually a classical archetype or stereotype – into one of his pieces, the poem deflates into cliché and sentimentality. Even worse, into that gracious, oozing brand of poetic misogyny common to a certain class of literary charmers, such as James Dickey or Patrick Lane.
Getty’s chorus girls include the statue of the “green woman,” the crone who “peels a boy’s skin,” a high school hooker whose body is “open/ to all who come,” “O Adrienne” from the awful “Awed Gesture” (a piece that chimes “jouissance” and “mischance,” together with the clumsy onomatopoeia of “nicker-neigh”), the virgin mother, a paean to Melissa Etheridge whose skin is grotesquely “flushed as wine,” and various anonymous females with “eiderdown” or “depending” breasts, lovely necks and black-lined eyes who are frequently depicted as false, serpentine, or potential Medusas.
I realize Getty, throughout Repose, is working not only with echoes of classical form and allusion, but also old-fashioned gender constructs and an overall antique aura, but it remains unclear just what he is trying to “re-pose” by parading out these crude, and ultimately insulting, figures. The recurrence of such similarly dead tropes is part of the reason why Tom Henihan, in his review of Getty’s first book, Reconciliation, wrote that Getty’s preoccupations are “passé” and the poems are not “divined but willed into existence.” Getty’s “over-willing” of his “thesis” in Repose detracts from the rich material grounding these poems, the lush imagery as in “the orange streams from the sun [lying] like ivy over clouds” from “Pastoral” or from “Song Against the Earth,” “the tulip is no part of you, fighting under snow,” as well as the compellingly apocalyptic and prophetic aura that hovers around Getty’s “rage against the machine.”
While Asa Boxer’s first book, The Mechanical Bird, exhibits, especially in the fourth and sixth parts, imagery akin to Getty’s – the wheel, the tool, the gear – Getty’s poems attend more often to installing them in the macrocosm of history, both through his allusive apparatus and his decorously shaped ire. Boxer’s “thing” pieces are closer-cropped, zoomed in à la PK Page or Naomi Shihab Nye, on the gear-train, the apron or even on the lie, which becomes, in his fifth section, a near-tactile object to be classified, itemized and thereby deconstructed. The tools in his sequence “The Workshop,” which won the CBC Literary Award in 2004, are “annointed king(s),” purifiers, miracle-makers, deflectors of injury, crypts, lizards, silverfish, a “zodiac of power,” woodpeckers and other naturalized or mythical metaphors. Boxer isn’t afraid of grand poetic leaps. Though the mechanical clock in “The Mechanico-Corpuscular Age” is said to coldly divide “the globe” and coordinate “war,” most of the tools humans use in Boxer’s book are treated tenderly, returned to their old-fashioned origins, placed on a nostalgic pedestal. Even the Gear-Train whose mechanisms are described as functioning through the number of “kisses” the “pallet” smacks upon the “scape-wheel.” Perhaps because Boxer sticks to the non-human for the most part – only his second, politically overt section, weakly reeling in a disturbingly symbolic Hitler and a somewhat more palatable but still sentimentalized portrait of Ahab who should be a movie star but is instead “fixed above a dirty sink” – does he steer clear of the contrivances of character that mar Getty’s collection, especially in relation to his female “types.”
Boxer is strongest when creating dark hymns to species such as the polar bear. In possibly the most powerful poem in the book, the “animal of ice” emerging in its melancholic wholeness through the five quatrains’ caress of the bear’s muscles, jaw, organs, dreams and fur, its metaphors carefully paced, thus enabling Boxer to avoid some of the heavy-footed anaphora of other pieces like “The Travellers”: “He trusts/he trusts/he knows/he must/he must.” Getty’s allusiveness is mainly on the surface, at times more than a little awkwardly inserted, as in “Valentine’s”: “You remind me of the father in Kafka’s Judgment.” Boxer’s references are generally submerged in his Biblically-resonant tone and even metre, apart from poems like “The Birchbark Canoe” that fall into the sing-song patter of nursery rhymes with its litany of invited cultural voyageurs: “Louis Cyr will manage our impossible portage and Kravitz will buy us the land.”
Though Aparna Sanyal suggests that Boxer’s “great artistry might be better exercised in remoter regions,” I think that it is in the close and known that Boxer shines, his rhythms tightening, his images honing themselves on the whetstone of smallness and humility, from the “muzzy lobster” gawped at by the “smutchy children,” to the toolboxes and their “clatter of metal/ clunk of clamps.” Language often accomplishes more with less; the aural dearth that regularly dogs Getty’s Repose as it slackens and meanders into pompous generalities is less an issue in Boxer’s Mechanical Bird due to his attention to the world’s tangible “calabash and pith.”