"The Islander," "Pomegranate," and "The Face"

The selections from Gluck’s first book were interesting. I did not know that she once wrote in fragments. “The Islander,” with its ellipsis points and resistance to clear narrative transition, almost resembles a “language poem.” Like many of Gluck’s other poems, this one reads like an intimate correspondence. In fact, the correspondence in the “The Islander” is so intimate that it becomes hermetic. For example, can we be sure which island the speaker and the “you” are on? The subways would seem to indicate Manhattan, but, as far as I know, chickens do not roam New York City. Of course, the chickens might not be literal. I do not think the grapes are literal; they represent whichever drug the “you” spends his nights looking for. Like anyone speaking to a loved one or thinking about a loved one, the speaker of “The Islander” does not feel the need to describe the context of relationship or why she uses the language of folklore in a modern city.
Poems like “The Islander” make me think twice about Altieri’s argument in Sense and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. Poems of intimate correspondence, which are often scenic and written in a “natural style”, have a long history--one that dates further back than the failed cultural revolution of the 1960s. I could say that they go all the way back to 8th century China, but I do not read Chinese, so I can only say that American poets became interested in them after Ezra Pound published his free-verse translations of Chinese poems in Cathay. (The poet Charles Wright believes that this volume established the line as the unit of measure in American poetry). The fact that these translations were not accurate does not matter as much as the fact that whatever techniques Pound gleaned or appropriated from Tu Fu and Li Po—descriptions of natural scenes, sincere speakers, etc.—had an enormous impact on American poetry. An interest in the ancient poems no doubt precipitated imagism. So did all the fragments of Greek poetry that nearly everyone—Pound, H.D., etc.—was reading in the British museum. “The Islander” reminds me of not only of H.D.’s poems, but also Pound’s “Papyrus,” a translation of a Sapphic fragment: “Spring . . . / Too long . . . / Gongula . . .” These four words need no context: it’s Spring, and someone’s lover, Gongula, has been gone for far too long. Like Gluck’s poem, “Papyrus” demands that we fill in the context. In both poems, it is the foregrounding of artifice through fragments— or, as Perloff explains, the act of “lifting the saying out of the zone of things said [i.e. spoken in normal conversation], or framing the given object . . . in a new way” (130)—that creates an illusion of sincerity. We can imagine, if just for a moment, that these poems are letters or journals found in some museum. This illusion would be utterly destroyed if the poet’s “critical consciousness” slipped into the poem.
David St. John and Gluck, in her later poems, try to maintain a balance between the critical consciousness with which modernity has cursed us and the illusions necessary for art. Gluck uses myths and fables to maintain this balance. In “Pomegranate,” for example, she at once delves into an intimate relationship between mother and daughter and consciously explores an archetype through which this relationship has been understood. As David St. John tells the story about the movie of his life, he addresses the concerns that a number of literary critics have raised about autobiographies, journals, and the poems structured on them. The refrain of “Assembling, dissembling” addresses two major concerns of Altieri: 1.) that poets construct or assemble themselves in poems 2.) that this assembling is a form of masking or dissembling. Also, I may be wrong, but I think St. John explicitly explains the structure of his book in poem XVIII. He visits his old university and listens to a lecturer say, “’My ambition here is the collapsing of several languages / Upon one another, all the while subtracting the narrative armature until only / The activated field of the implied narrative remains.’” In the poem, his response to this lecture is less than flattering, but I think that this reaction is either self-deprecating or just simply a poet’s gut reaction to the way in which academic criticism turns art into an abstract mix of theory and praxis. St. John intersperses moments of self-consciousness, or lucidity, among moments of pure lyricism: “Black leaves. The notebooks filling with ash. The limbs of the city / Warping toward heaven, the limbs of angels angling toward the earth” (“V”). This very mixture of lucidity and lyricism is what the lecturer attempts to describe.