What Work Isn't: On Philip Levine

Philip Levine’s death last week has prompted, for a poet, that is, an unusual number of public tributes. I’ve read several in the NY Times and heard two separate eulogies on NPR. My pal Robert Archambeau has written a very eloquent elegy for Levine at his blog. All fine and well, but neither Mark Strand nor Allen Grossman, both of whom died last year and both indisputably finer poets than Levine, received this kind of attention on their passing. Of the three of these, Grossman was the Master. But his work is difficult, full of gnostic intricacies, compared to Levine’s prosaic banality and sentimentality. The poet of work, he’s been called, for mining a brief period of time in his life, before he spent over 30 years teaching.

Of course teaching is work and hard work, too, if very different. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two I did my share of hard labor on shop floors, on assembly lines, in a shipyard and a paint factory and behind broiling friers. So I know what “work” is. I also know the kind of work that involves long hours spent behind a desk, grading papers, analyzing insurance data, writing code, or reading screenplays. For Levine work seems to take place only in an industrial sphere. It’s the work only men do. Or used to. Is there any mention of the domestic labor women have done for ages in a Levine poem? I’d like to know, sincerely, but I seem to have sold off all his books, alas.

Radio producers and journalists know a meme when they see one: here’s a poet who wrote about work – the idol before which all Americans bow down to and worship – and he wrote about it in simple, straightforward language. He wrote about it in a way that elevated the worker and praised him for his stoicism and his wounds. He wrote about it in a way that was not too far removed from a WPA or WWII propaganda pamphlet. “Brother, Can You Spare a Rhyme?” He wrote about the alienation and suffering of a certain kind of work – labor in Detroit’s car plants, shop floor environments my father and his friends worked on – and he wrote about it with a certain pathos but without ever managing somehow to offer any powerful criticism of the forces that kept this system in place.

When Levine’s The Simple Truth came out in 1995, I gave it a glowing review, comparing him, grandiosely, absurdly, to Francois Villon, Cesar Vallejo and Nazim Hikmet. This gaseous praise merited a prickly letter to the editor from Anselm Hollo and marked the beginning of our friendship, along with a transformation of my views about what poetry is. Which became for me a different kind of work than what Levine undertook.

Marjorie Perloff is still right. Levine represents Exhibit A in how experience gets ground into poetry through the most simplistic formula. A string of descriptive anecdotes rounded out by an epiphany? At least, that’s how I remember her famous and very accurate put-down, How can a poet claim to write about work and not critique the system that enslaves men and women everywhere? Jeremy Prynne, for all his bristling apostasy and hermeneutical obscurity, is a greater poet of “work” than Phillip Levine ever was. Because Levine, finally, was not a poet of ideas – a notion he would no doubt gladly ascribe too. His own work ethic blinded him to the reality of work.

His famous poem “What Work Is” is not about work as such, but a valentine to his brother, an aspiring opera singer. There’s some overcooked irony about a Jew wanting to sing Wagner in it, too, but finally it’s a poem about discipline and aspiration rather than work. A poem about wanting to escape the jail of work for the freedom of art. The scandal of Philip Levine – and the reason for his lionization – is that he has no clue what work is. To read a Levine poem about work gives one the impression that workers suffer because of mysterious unnamed forces or mere human malice and caprice. Work degrades the soul, demeans the person, exhausts the body. That’s what work is. Levine gets part of that right -- how work strips a person of their dignity -- but has no idea and has never bothered to ponder why work is. This failure to probe deeper mars his late poetry considerably, yet has managed to endear him to many readers. Still, in his early work, in books like Names of the Lost, for instance, he was capable of striking a powerful and elegaic tone.

Post-script: after further reflection and reading some thoughtful comments by readers of this post on Facebook I've toned down the rhetoric in this entry, which was needlessly harsh, and revised it somewhat. My overall point is not to castigate Levine for bad poetry -- though his late work does suffer from mannerism -- but rather a kind of bad faith. If the subject of a poem about the travails of work only portrays its sufferers as downtrodden figures deserving of our sympathy, without condemning the system that produces that suffering then these figures become mere fetishes, stand-ins for dishonest emotion.

Remembering Anselm Hollo

Homage to the Raven
i.m. Anselm Hollo

“And now what time is it”?
asks the raven at the end
of the world.

Time to get with the program!

Here on planet Earth
the program demands
we transmit every message
through the fraying vocab
for belonging.

But look, says the raven.
I, too, am frayed.
Fading into the inky
blackness of my wings
where song is a structure
for the ruins of time

my croak a kind of white
melody ascendant
the spiral glyph of M31
its arms of light
a cosmic call sign
flashing plenitude
& emptiness.

“Like Marx or Helen’s ankles
at the gates of dusk”
quoth the raven.

Adios, all you “guests of space”
soon to be remanded
to an infinity of un-
troubled dust.

But my poems refuse
to get with the program.
They will destroy
entropy forever.

from SONG X, Talisman House, 2014
first pub. in SPOKE 2.1 (2014)

Poetry Roundup 2014

This is not a “best of” list since the very idea of arranging yearly readings fetishizes the new and builds obnoxious hierarchies; it also reinforces spurious notions of critical omniscience. Most year-end Best Of lists are less about critical acumen than the dominant market forces of Big Publishing or Hollywood studios and the ways in which the circulation of the eternal same flourishes. It depresses me when I read a review of the same middlebrow novel over and over and over in The Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, NYRB, LRB, etc. This is why a review publication like Rain Taxi is invaluable for its devoted attention to the small press scene, where so much vital literature is being published. The public relations machine of Big Pub produces an overwhelming and monotonous conformity and a banal chorus of yea-sayers. Anyway, I don’t spend my time on all that. It’s not so much that I’m a snob. I just a have a different set of priorities. So “best” poetry is a silly category, finally. There’s too much poetry in any given year to take in and far too little of it that comes my way. I can’t pretend to even have been aware of a very small percentage of the work circulating through the poetry sphere. A few of these titles were not published in 2014 but this is the year I discovered them, so they’re new to me.

Robert Adamson | Net’s Needle | Flood Editions

Ed Barrett | toward blue peninsula | Pressed Wafer

Daniel Bouchard | Art + Nature | Ugly Duckling

Amy Catanzano | Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella | Noemi Press

Thomas Devaney | Calamity Jane | Furniture Press

Joseph Donahue | Red Flash on a Black Field | Black Square

Rachel Blau DuPlessis | Interstices | Subpress

Joel Felix | Limbs of the Apple Tree Never Die | Verge

Allen Grossman | Descartes’ Loneliness | New Directions

Fanny Howe | Second Childhood | Greywolf

Pierre Joris | Barzakh: Poems 2000-2012 | Black Widow Press

Pierre Joris | Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry | FSG

Hank Lazer | N24 | little read leaves textile

Jackson MacLow | Complete Light Poems | Chax Press (Jan 2015)

Joseph Massey | To Keep Time | Omnidawn

Jennifer Moxley | The Open Secret | Flood Editions

David Need | Rilke’s Roses | Horse and Buggy Press

Fred Moten | The Feel Trio | Letter Machine

Jeffrey Pethybridge | Striven, the Bright Treatise | Noemi Press

Karen Randall | Extruded Gilgamesh: an introspection & Inanna: of the Entangled Ligatures & the Dearth of Thin Ink | Propolis Press

Claudia Rankine | Citizen | Greywolf

Robert Seydel | Songs of S. | Siglio/Ugly Duckling

Harvey Shapiro | A Momentary Glory: Last Poems | Wesleyan

Lissa Wolsak | Of Beings Alone | Nomados

Jay Wright | Disorientations: Groundings | Flood Editions

Damage Report: Stallone, Robocop, and The Wounded Warrior

On Late Stallone

The pseudo-melancholy of late Stallone in recent films like The Expendables and Escape Plan points to a small but important shift in how aging American masculinity is represented on the screen. Whereas Sly used to stand as an exemplar of the Reagan era “hard body,” as Susan Jeffords put it, he has now cannily reinvented himself as a new kind of iconic figurehead – the aging hero, battered by loss, yet still determinedly loyal to his comrades and his code, fighting the good fight against insuperable odds or a corrupt system or regime.

Physically he has become even more beautiful, that is, more ugly and battered. The voice has dropped even lower – every word is uttered basso profundo, as though he had found a way to reduce the Book of Genesis to the intonation of a few grunted monosyllables. Stallone’s perpetual hangdog features – the drooping eyelids, surrounded by scar tissue (real or make up?), the thick sensual mouth, often wrapped around a cigar – have become exaggerated with age and signify a comfortable, if grotesquely nostalgic view of American manhood post-9/11. He no longer asserts his dominance directly, but instead asks us to take him in, a stray dog buffeted about by the radical changes to the cultural status of maleness. “Save the Dinosaurs” might be his bumper sticker. His leathery carapace acts as a kind of armor – both deflecting danger and making him, by dint of all his wrinkles, even more vulnerable. Poor Sly – always so forlorn and laconic.

In these late films he has come into his perverse own as an exemplar of minimalism. Not unlike two other genuine masters of acting minimalism in cinema, John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, he has found a way to turn his liabilities as an actor into his greatest asset. Rocky and Rambo were figures whose besieged grandeur derived from how the system they trusted in betrayed them. This is the core of the Stallone brand and he has figured out how to keep selling this decayed aura through the current form of weak cultural anxieties. But the real genius of Sylvester Stallone is that he has become the high priest presiding over his own funeral. The Expendables is a plea for the utterly dispensable.

Post-script: The title, The Expendables, conjures up images of sacrifice, or even a kind of noble nihilism, but of course nobody but the baddies die in these films. It's all a comic fist-pumping brofest. A far cry from one of the best films about war ever made, John Ford's magnificent They Were Expendable (1946). In Ford's vision the best men are routinely slaughtered in the line of duty.

As the Duke puts it in a moving funeral scene, after the US troops have been beaten down in the Phillippines:

"Serviceman is supposed to have a funeral. That's a tribute to the way he spent his life. Escort, firing squad, wrapped in the flag he served under and died for. In a war you gotta forgot those things and get buried the best way you can. You all knew Squarehead Larson and Slug Mahan. They were just a couple of bluejackets who did their job and did it well. Squarehead Larson -- he was the best cook in the Navy. He loved the old Arizona. Now they're both gone. Slug -- he was always quoting verse, bits of poetry. So here's one for him. It's about the only one I know"

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

The New Robocop

The new Robocop lacks the razor-sharp satirical edge that made Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film such a delight. It also lacks the pathos. In the original Robocop Murphy, as he begins to reclaim his humanity, finds himself devastated and utterly alone, his wife and son having been told he’s dead. His predicament is more than one of the usual anti-hero’s existential alienation – having lost both his family and his very body he’s condemned to a posthumous existence. He is a man who has outlived himself.

This Robocop, rather absurdly, yet cunningly, places family at its emotional center. Instead of recoiling in horror from what her husband has become – a mere stand-in for himself, a grotesque remnant, straight out of a horror film – the wife (played by Abbie Cornish of the appealing, defiantly upturned nose) adopts a fiercely loyal “stand by your man” attitude. What’s compelling about this approach is that the idea of Robocop has been made over into a rather effective allegory about returning vets who’ve undergone traumatic injury or prosthetic surgery in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a palliative Robocop. It offers the impossible dream of redeeming both the shattered body and the families who have been broken apart by ten years of useless war in the Middle East.

This is emphasized in two key scenes: the first, before we even see the unveiled (and grossly dismembered) Robocop, who is now little more than a head and a pair of lungs, is set in a clinic where a guitarist with a prosthetic hand magically learns how to play again (the music is Joaqin Rodrigo’s “Concierto for Aranjuez,” a clear signal to NPR-liberals). The second takes place in the closing shot of the film, where the reunited family stands resolutely inside their doorway as the camera dollies back, standing tall together, come what may, even though the hero/father is permanently maimed, imprisoned in a monstrous metal body, incapable of anything but feeling the harrowing absence of human touch.

The romantic appeal of the new Robocop is that no matter the damage inflicted by trauma, by the state, by technology, by the colonization of the body, there remains some spark of soul and humanity that cannot be subdued. This is the stuff of Hollywood and humanist dreams. Spirit will always triumph over fate. But as Jake Barnes more astutely surmises at the end of The Sun Also Rises, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

SONG X: New and Selected Poems

I'm very pleased to announce the publication of SONG X: New and Selected Poems, just out from Talisman House Publishers. SONG X collects work from seven previous books and chapbooks and one artist's book, co-produced with Charles Alexander and Cynthia Miller and released in a very limited edition. With the earliest poems dating from the mid-90s, SONG X gathers over twenty years of work, much of it in the tradition of the gnostic postmodernist lyric, from books that are either out of print or hard to find. It also includes a generous offering of new poems.

"I hear the motion in these stirring poems as radiant spans of thought, 'the Auto-Graphic gesture of becoming.' A reader will experience the recurrence of a most ancient way of being lost, a world stranger, a visitor here, an X who travels in one long single take. For Pritchett, the word is the sign of a divine spark that must be continually fueled by more thought. Not cinematic: secret. The poems unveil an orange glow behind loneliness, a color beyond erasure." --Fanny Howe

"Patrick Pritchett's Song X takes its title from the classic free jazz album by Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman. And like the music on that album, Pritchett's poetry seeks to wrest itself from the inherent materiality of its making so that it may achieve an impossibly pure spirit of lyricism. As the poet declares, 'this is the beauty that smites the city,' a visionary assault that comes 'In the asterisk that occludes or names each event.' Song X contains a generous selection from Pritchett's earlier collections, including Burn, his daring 'doxology' on the martyrdom of Joan of Arc, and Gnostic Frequencies, a work that as clearly reveals the antinomian and acosmic impulses that are shaking up contemporary American poetry as any I might name. To read Pritchett is to walk upon 'the ground / that undescribes you.' And that is holy ground." --Norman Finkelstein

"Patrick Pritchett is an exceptional poet. His revelatory Song X is a gift of life and years and gives up many joys and lived private truth. He is not afraid of beauty and its formal intellect in the estate of song. It's great to have this essential gathering of his work, it's a great book." --Peter Gizzi

On "Roses: The Late French Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke"

David Need's masterful translations of Rilke's late work in French are now available in an exquisite edition from David Wofford's Horse & Buggy Press. The artist Clare Johnson has produced a series of interstitial, stand-alone ink drawings which add a whole new dimension to the poems and Need has provided a beautiful autobiographical meditation on what Rilke means to him -- and us -- as an afterword. This is one of the most sensual books, in every sense -- spiritual, erotic, and tactile -- that I've come upon in some time. I'm delighted to have been asked to contribute, along with Joe Donahue, a blurb, which you can read below. It's also a substantial contribution to the vast body of Rilke scholarship and translations in English.

"Rilke sang of actual roses, the tangible incarnadine flower, not some abstract Platonic ideal. In these intimate and luminous translations from his post-Elegies work, written in French, David Need rescues Rilke from the cult of New Age positivism, restoring his uncanny mystery, his harrowing commitment to dwell along the perilous and empowering borderline between inner necessity and a manufactured world of dead objects. The realm of Rilke’s roses is chthonic and immanent. All aperture and cusp, fold and further fold, the flesh of the rose’s petals permits both a bantering playfulness and the most profound experience of evanescence and fragility. Because they die into themselves each day, Rilke’s roses are always undergoing loss and transformation; they are his highest allegories for praise and finitude, Orpheus and Eurydice conjoined. In the classic Rilkean gesture, they are always departing, always arriving – the impossible moment of plenitude and emptiness, Celan’s niemandsrose – the poem that knows itself by knowing no one. Or as Rilke has it: 'no one’s sleep beneath so many lids…'"

The Blunt Edge of Tomorrow

Edge of Tomorrow – a highly entertaining if overlong mix of preposterous metaphysics and uber-meta-cinematic technique – is when, all is said and done, the most elaborate cute-meet and courtship film perhaps ever made. It’s also a movie about how a novice version of Tom Cruise, wimpy and unsure of himself, learns how to become the unstoppable professionalized Tom Cruise. In other words, a kind of boot camp for stardom.

The logic of the film is the Mulligan – a golfer's series of endless do-overs. (I should know; once reader, I did golf. Badly). This produces a kind of philosophical slapstick that is very amusing and a subtle if not sufficiently elaborated critique of the working of capital and everyday life. You have to wake up. You have to go to work. There's always some guy yelling at you to pick up the pace. Repetition, as Adorno might say, is the lynchpin of capital, the human body reduced to a machine performing the same tasks over and over.

Cinematicaly, it works because it’s entirely consistent with, indeed, evolves out of the principles of montage. A logical inference of causation or association is established by simply cutting from one image/scene to a parallel one. The audience fills in the gaps. The gaps -- both cinematic as well as narrative -- consist of jumps in time. The script is smartly constructed; as Richard Brody remarks, it's "Groundhog Day meets Saving Private Ryan" (which is probably just how it was pitched, I imagine).

Brody is right, too, when he points out that Doug Liman, the director, missed a chance to explore the script's implications of a truly harrowing existential crisis: what it means for a person to become unstuck in time, ala Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, or Traven in Ballard's "Terminal Beach." Pilgrim's journey becomes a martyr's progress, but Traven grows deranged. Cage's name indicates his predicament: the trap of endless resurrection, which is also the dilemma Stanislav Lem (as well as Soderbergh) investigates in Solaris. Instead, Edge of Tomorrow is content to revel in its nested doll/maze-like plot about continual reiteration. This is the logic of FPS games. But it also mimics the film production process -- next take, better take/fix it in post -- and indeed, the marauding aliens are called, for reasons that go unexplained, "Mimics."

But the end result of repelling the alien invasion and its lotus-like hive mind, glowing beautifully at the bottom of a flooded Louvre like a mammoth Damien Hirst installation, is only to serve as prelude for Cruise’s naïve, shirking Major Cage to learn how to become a fitting match for the Angel of Verdun AKA Full Metal Bitch, played with cut-throat aplomb and glistening deltoids by Emily Blunt, a blue-eyed beauty who suffers no fools as she wields an enormous carbon-fiber blade like some avenging Valkyrie. "The Angel of Verdun," of course, is a famous sculpture by Rodin which, if memory serves, Geoff Dyer writes about in his wonderful book on World War I memorials, "The Missing of the Somme." So "Edge" is also a film about star-crossed lovers and destiny and all that rot. To win the war, the hero must learn how to win the heroine. The rest is not silence, but explosion.

The credit music for Edge of Tomorrow should have been Chrissie Hynde's sardonic "Like in the Movies," (from Stockholm): "the audience goes home satisfied/because nobody really died." I went home satisfied, in a Hollywood popcorn sort of way, even though the film annoyed me no end. It's impossible not to compare this film to Cruise's last SF outing, the vastly inferior "Oblivion." Both hinge on replicating the hero through multiple iterations; "Oblivion," via clones, in "Edge," through constant re-births. Has Tom Cruise (who's better here than he has been in a long time) acquired some kind of ironic distance on his own image, offering us a commentary on stardom's emptiness? Or has his vanity metastasized, achieving some kind of infernal Omega Point of the image, disappearing up its own fundament?