St. John: Altieri in verse

I think that much of St. John’s The Face discusses the dynamics involved in creating poetry and the aftermath of that process. If you read the book as “A Novella in Verse”—the subtitle encourages this—then it is more obvious than usual that the poems will interconnect.

The words “assembling” and “dissembling” recur throughout the poems of the book, sometimes together, sometimes apart. In poem II on page 4, St. John writes “Maybe/ That’s who I’ve been all along, just this restless anybody/ Assembling the reflections along the windows of drugstores, dress shops,/ Fruit sellers, hair stylists, stationery specialists & health food/ Supplement wizards on Main Street…” In this passage and many, as in so many others, St. John addresses some of the issues in the Altieri chapter. First, Altieri explains that “the desire for sincerity or naturalness…seems continually in tension with the highly artificial means required to produce the desired effects at a level of intensity adequate for lyric poetry”(15). Instead of an attempt at that sincerity or naturalness, St. John calls attention to it; he is highlighting the artificiality of poetry. He, the poet, can simply walk along Main Street and assemble the reflections in various places of business to create a poem. But, he refers to this type of person as a “restless anybody,” far from what I’m sure he considers a poet in his mind. So, on the fourth page of the book we’ve already got the poet in the picture calling attention to the construction of poetry.

Second, Altieri examines the “I” in contemporary poetry. He says that “The danger in contemporary poetry, and in contemporary culture, is that we see the ironic, depersonalizing forces so clearly that we flee into forms of extreme privacy that we hope are as inviolate as they are inarticulate”(16). I think that St. John offers a commentary on this exact sentiment. He alternates between Altieri’s depersonalizing forces and extreme privacy in The Face. At one moment he’s allowing Infanta to cast a teenage girl to play his character in the movie of his life. This seems to be about as depersonalizing as it gets. At another moment, however, he poses the questions “Who am I? (Who Was I; who will I be?); and at still another, he refers to the black room in which he’s been. In the final scene, for God’s sake, he’s watching his own life on a screen with a crowd of people in a movie theatre. This depersonalization is then juxtaposed with the intensely private moment of puking in a trash can. So, perhaps St. John is offering the same argument that Altieri is at times.

Finally, I see a criticism of what Altieri calls dominant modes in St. John’s poetry. Altieri refers to “one aspect of a feature in dominant mode that has wide ramifications: It shapes a good deal more than it positively describes”(8). Now, St. John’s novella tells the story of a director, Infanta, shaping art, the film of St. John’s (presumably) life. So couldn’t Infanta represent some sort of dominant mode shaping art, or rather St. John’s poetry? He watches as the dominant contemporary mode shapes his poetry and then sits behind the crowd as they analyze his work, which ultimately causes him to become sick to his stomach.