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It would
seem, after several generations of practitioners, that the American
poet's appetite for the spare, vaguely surrealistic, free-verse poem is
limitless. After all, the composition of such poems takes no particular
technical skill and does not make "excessive" demands on its
readership (or authorship, for that matter); it is authenticated by the
sincerity its author displays through his indiscriminate elimination of
artifice and his empathy for the outcasts, losers, and dispossessed that
populate the margins of society (empathy being a far better ploy than
pity, for ultimately, we are all estranged and isolated). The ability to
"confess" from the depths of mental illness or drug addiction
is a bonus. It seems tired now because, well, it is; however, in their
infancy, the movements born from this approach to poetry were fresh and
disturbing, and they ennervated what had become a pretty stolid scene in
American poetry.
This method of writing--and the sensibility
from which it springs--has proven more adaptable than one might have
imagined fifty years ago. It can accommodate a great many subjects and
modes, from dry, academic exercises in language that only Bahktin could
love to downright sentimentalism. It has become the Impressionism of
contemporary American poetry, a movement started as an attempt to
disorganize the senses devolving into middle-American bathroom art. The
perfect "form" for contemporary America, it is both
anti-intellectual and hyper-intellectual; comfortable, self-satisfied,
and yet unfulfilled; yearning to contain multitudes, yet essentially
solipsistic; obsessed with dysfunction and enchanted by illogic (such as
the kind that obtains when image and ideation lack connective tissue à
la Surrealism).
For those readers eager to find something
fresh, Lloyd Schwartz's Cairo Traffic unfortunately will not
satisfy. Almost parodic at times in its usage of plain speech (one poem
is entirely composed of malapropisms, which is fun for about 6 lines), Cairo
Traffic relies most heavily on its simple and direct approach
derived from a thoroughgoing earnestness, despite the all-too-familiar,
wink-wink gestures toward acknowledging the interstices of meaning
present in even the most simple of language. In the volume's first poem
("A True Poem"), Schwartz writes:
And this poem
says exactly what I think.
What I think of
myself, what I think of my friends, what I think about my lover.
Exactly.
As if the title and deceptively direct manner
didn't already alert the reader to a tongue-in-cheek moment, the
one-word line is added so that even the literarily-challenged may enjoy
the joke. And of course, the poem is about the poem, for ultimately, the
speaker is "working on a poem that's so true, [he] can't show it to
anyone," and "Nobody will ever see it." The conflation of
sincerity with poetic self-consciousness is at best confusing, and at
worst, it ruins the whole endeavor, for it is the supposed sincerity of
the volume that underwrites its simple language; bring that into doubt
and much of the volume sounds like exercises pulled from an ESL
workbook. Granted, the poem is all play, and there certainly is no harm
in playing, but some poets play better than others.
Throughout the volume there exists a faux
riskiness that attempts to disturb, to jar, or to reveal; however, more
often, these episodes, when viewed within the context of contemporary
American poetry, don't really risk anything. Rather, they are the
application of practiced and ready-made gestures that many readers will
find as familiar as a favorite recliner or mattress. For example, in
"The Two Churches (A Dream)," Mr. Schwartz poeticizes an
imagined homosexual encounter with "a round / ugly little man, with
a face like a rubber ball" inside of a Baroque cathedral. The
encounter is brief and unconsummated (mercifully), and the poem ends by
repeating its initial quatrain (with a space introduced between the
third and fourth lines), this time in italics, in case the reader missed
the significance of what seemed to be mere reportage the first time
around:
In the square,
there are two churches, not just one--two
great Baroque churches, facing each other--decaying,
yet magnificent.
Almost identical, except that one
is locked, and the door to the other is wide open.
Before circling back, the poem's main action
concludes with back rubs and kisses that one supposes are meant to
humanize the participants after such a powerful and incongruous display
of libido; however, it comes off as a curious mixture of silliness and
syrupiness, recalling the comedy skit lampooning encounters in gay
pornographic movies that invariably begin, "Looks like you could
use a back rub." Indeed, upon repeating the quatrain, the strange
dream world of the poem degenerates into a locus for vague moralizing,
leaving the implicit sense that all of those dogmatic, conventional
parishioners in the other, locked church are hopelessly repressed,
lacking in self-knowledge, so forth and so on. Simply put, to use such
simplistic language in the service of such bland and overt intimations
is hardly "risky." Instead, the poem lumbers to its
predictable conclusion in its predictable way.
Elsewhere, Mr. Schwartz refines his skill at
aestheticizing the seedier aspects of sexuality. In
"Pornography," a triptych of stock pornographic images, the
poet's use of street slang (referring to the penis as "his Fenway
Frank; his juicy / all-day sucker") coalesces with high-culture
religious references (Rembrandt) in the hopes of having the qualities of
rarified spirituality rub off on the carnality depicted by the
pornographic images. The poem concludes by describing the participants
of a ménage à trois:
Not innocent-
but nothing about
them
hard, or hardened
yet;
not yet past
taking pleasure
in whatever
pleasure they
receive, or give.
This gospel of pleasure recalls Malcolm
Muggeridge's famous proclamation at the dawn of the Sexual Revolution
that "the orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and
the image of fulfillment." The mixed legacy of liberation
notwithstanding, of more concern here is the speaker's projection of a
thoroughly uncomplicated world onto the images he views. Neither in
Paradise nor the Inferno, the men and women who people these images
exist in a kind of pleasure vacuum, and thus enter the realm of fantasy.
And the speaker seems quite intent on allowing them to languish there;
therefore, the concluding observation is more sight than insight.
The rest of the volume doesn't stray far in
style or substance from the foregoing, despite the presence of two
interestingly rendered translations. In addition to some tedious poems
focused on the poet's aging mother, there is a long title poem that
mixes travelogue, straightforward prose and poetry in a further
exploration of the spirit/body duality of which Mr. Schwartz is fond.
But little in Cairo Traffic recommends itself to those readers
seeking an escape from the easy verities of contemporary American
poetry. |