Whirled order

Two young poets extend old lyric traditions

by Regan Good

Robert Lowell once wrote, speaking metaphorically, that a poet is someone who spends a lifetime reinterpreting the same four or five photographs. Joshua Clover's Madonna anno domini (Louisiana State Uni-versity Press, 68 pages, $11.95), which won the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award for 1996, and Jane Mead's The Lord and the General Din of the World (Sarabande Books, 81 pages, $12.95), winner of the 1995 Kathryn A. Morton Prize, are first collections by young American poets who have already discovered their five photographs. Mead's might be thought of as images from a family album; Clover's, color snapshots taken at a carnival photo booth.

Mead tells of her father's substance abuse, as well as her own struggles with "the junkie's twilight sleep," detoxes, suicide, and feelings of isolation. Her powerful, careful work descends from the confessional poets, such as John Berryman and Lowell. In a measured, first-person style, she engages in active verbal battle with the Creator, defining her Lord against modern horrors and personal confusions.

Clover's poems, by contrast, flirt with more avant-garde notions, following the leads of Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery. Drawing on postmodern aesthetics, Clover invents worlds by employing associative logic and techniques of collage and pastiche. Rarely does he openly reflect upon personal situations; indeed, the speakers of many of his poems remain elusive.

But to say Mead's poetry is "confessional" and Clover's "postmodern" is to drastically oversimplify the complexity of these poets' books. Mead, too, is an inventor, and Clover also a confessor.

Mead's harrowing poems often take the form of addresses to God, or to her self (painfully split into warring entities, soul and body), to her father, to various lost or struggling souls. The poem "Concerning the Prayer I Cannot Make" begins with the speaker, sitting by a river, asking for a sign:

Jesus, I am cruelly lonely

and I do not know what I have done

nor do I suspect that you will answer me.

Then the poet chastises herself, reminding herself of physical matter's indifference to spiritual questions:

I am not equal to my longing.

Somewhere there should be a place

the exact shape of my emptiness --

there should be a place

responsible for taking one back.

The river, of course, has no mercy --

it just lifts the dead fish

toward the sea.

Of course, of course.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Listen --

all you bare trees

burrs

brambles

pile of twigs

red and green lights flashing

muddy bottle shards

show half buried -- listen

listen, I am holy.

Shifting her focus from an unresponsive godhead to the quotidian world, Mead metaphorically performs her own baptism.

Mead risks what had become unfashionable; she uses the extreme circumstances of life as material. And she doesn't shy from dramatic emotional gestures like direct questions ("Lord, is the general din of the world your own?") and statements ("I am lost and do not know who I am, or if/ life has anything to do with prayer."). In the true spirit of confessional poetry, where the hell of not telling the truth is more paralyzing than the risk of doing so, Mead forges poems that cleanse and redeem.

The poem "LaGuardia, the Story" illustrates the poet's restless search for solace:

Some nights I make a killer pot of coffee --

I put on the music that I love,

and dance. Sometimes I dance for hours.

Go to your phonograph. Put on

Brandenburg Concerto Number Six.

This is about something very hard.

-- This is about trying to live with that music

playing in the back of your mind.

-- About trying to live in a world

with that kind of music.

What makes her feel alive -- being racked up on caffeine, listening to Bach's complex music -- amounts to an edgy pleasure, but a true one, matching her serious nature. Bach's ordered music orders her passion in turn.

Joshua Clover is a political poet and a social critic, and though he is searching, just as Mead is, for some sense of order and intelligibility, he attempts it through radically different means. Like Ashbery, Clover takes in everything, using fragmentation as his ordering principle. His poems move in quick, restless, playful shifts; their interesting surfaces enfold disconnected bits of information -- from pop tunes on the radio to references to Eliot's The Waste Land.

The book begins with the comic-book expletive "Ka-Boom!" The poem "The nevada glassworks" serves as a perfect introduction to this poet's world. In "glassworks," Clover elides the historical testing of the Bomb with his mother's sexual awakening (and eventually his own inception) into a compressed, manic anthem. Here, the terrible "creation" of the Manhattan Project scientists is compared to nature's drive -- to horrifying effect. The speaker declares: "What timing! What kisses!" The poet breaks into Woody Guthrie's classic song, but the familiar is heard as through a voice-distortion box: "This land is your land/This land Amnesia." Anger, grief, and fear have been distilled into a kind of bitter irony.

they're dropping some new science out there,

a picture-perfect hole blown clear to Asia:

everything in the desert -- Shazam! -- turns

to glass, gold glass, a picture window where

the bomb-dead kids are burned & burn & burn

Another representative example of Clover's style is the poem "St. matthew & the angel [guercino, c. 1640s]," which continually shifts focus -- from the San Francisco hills at dusk to goldfish in a lily pond, to birds in flight, to a "Zen garden," to ants on a Formica counter. The only constant is the eye, which takes it all in. The lights of the hills "crenellate in the mean eye into a useless & pretty Braque bowl." Each of the birds is a "strange attractor in the flux" of eyesight. Clover then wistfully points to the 20th century's thinking tool, the computer. How much experience have we lost in this century of "the miniature,/the microchip & the hand-held heaven"? And what about the human mind, Clover seems to ask -- that "thinking machine," the great receiver and organizer of material that constructs the self? Like the computer, the poem can process chaos: ordering, recalling, comparing. But like the superior instrument, it more than performs these tasks; it also invents meaning.

Clover is more than a postmodern aesthetician; he is also capable of pure lyrical passages, as in the poem "There is the body lying in state." Here the speaker describes the awful absence felt while observing a body before burial.

we are not that desperate for her

body's body to work itself around,

surely it will happen as arranged,

we are not so faithless as to lapse

into that all-night gesture

of supplication known as sleep

As in Stevens's "Emperor of Ice Cream," the world is mute, offering neither answer nor explanation. Clover's speaker relies on faith, rather than evidence, that the soul will rise -- that the soul, as in Mead's "Concerning the Prayer I Cannot Make," has some place to go.

Though their props may be different -- Mead's muddy shoes, Clover's microchips -- both poets struggle to talk about a world of order, beyond suffering. Perhaps for each of them, to act as witness is enough.