Courtesy Ugly Duckling Presse.
I’m thinking about a party I went to a while ago. People ate and drank, and those too distracted to leave before the levity slackened ended up in the kitchen, voicing regrettable proclamations about art or metaphysics or something. Half-an-hour fell to bemoaning the death of poetry. An academy-type raised his red cup as if commiserating at the wake of an estranged uncle. I took the show of enthusiasm as my exit cue, but on my way home began obsessing over the complaint. Since when has the poem been burdened with the expectation of dominion? Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” has been cited enough already for its forward that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Yet if poetry is not a force of authority, we shouldn’t likely expect it to play police. Poetry is process, and by its inefficacy locates its virtue, subversive and pliant as water.
Bellow’s egghead narrator in Humboldt’s Gift gets down-in-the-mouth about the disfigurement of the poet before reigning powers of science and technology. But his gripes are those of an artist struggling against materialist specters. If verse—the good stuff, at least—does anything, it calls attention to the otherwise negligible detail of the day-to-day and the elusive import housed therein. A helicopter trip might grant one a view of an entire cityscape, but perception does not preclude comprehension, or even apprehension. I can’t say I judge the fitness of a poem by how fast and cheap it gets me to California from New York, or by how mechanically it makes the fans in the bleachers stomp their feet. Better yet, the genuine poem, the cathartic whorl of language that sears through to the hippocampus, succeeds where the market fails—it grants its accomplices an eminent mobility, transport through expired time, through memory, through the ranging history of our mind.
Before we even crack its cover, Rick Snyder’s first full-length, Escape from Combray, promises action. As the title references the hometown of Proust’s memorable, nameless front man, so does it hint at themes of origin and transience. Over the course of nearly 40 lean poems Snyder positions his voice as one at the stitch of our collar. They reverberate with the timbre of the interior concern, which nevertheless paces its nerve through mundane landscapes as a “light bulb swung / in circles / casting light into / the corners.” Organically and off-the-cuff Snyder presses classical figureheads against the facade of the gas station, the convenience store at closing, the streets at midnight, the passing train. Contexts and their constellate symbols transpose, so that Erasmus in his labor rests beside two men ice-fishing, so that the apparition of Dante Alighieri hovers at a windy city intersection. Snyder conducts his “Hagiography” before a liquor store, where the saints take their “locusts / drowned in honey,” and sets a vision of afterlife “in a fluorescent lunchroom / …in a strange city, / at 4:15 in the morning.” Recollection intermingles with presence, chronology curves into itself. The poet aims at a “song / of interstices” and hits the mark dead-on, meanwhile eschewing any such determinacy. “Program Notes” poses as a poem writing itself out of existence, refuting a foretold ending, and the book’s closer, “The Memory of Whiteness,” finds its author owning up to himself—“my head is snowing / I’m sober / but my memories are drunk / it doesn’t matter much / what I am.” The collection approaches the character of dérive, as if our confidant is continually between books, between destinations or conclusions, tracking backwards to retrieve some keepsake he misplaces in the future.
Miraculously enough, we don’t get bored or frustrated with Snyder’s meandering appreciations. His poems represent lovely constructs of syntax and significance that unravel along the page with captivating rhythm. The lines scarcely push past tetrameter and arrange in neat couplets, triads, and quatrains, or otherwise assume narrow currents of text, one thought rippling into another. We float along with Snyder’s subdued music, from the Greek tragedies to those of Milwaukee Ave. and Fullerton, the Golgotha around the corner, and “walking under / the black leaves / dripping / from new metal stems” back to the apartment where we “drink the wine / and split your last / Orthonovum / staring down / at the desolation / of Seventh St.” Not only by the benefit of the speaker’s erudition but by his sense of play—a little Latin here, a joke in Spanish, a marvelously buried allusion to Marianne Moore—he accomplishes an informal gravity. Escape from Combray permits the discrete particulars to articulate a vista in which both joie de vivreand ennui figure as inept poses. Though we’re not always certain where we’re headed, we’re sure of where we are—rooted in this world and the others it presupposes. Timely and timeless, these poems—“Sky Blue,” “Pastoral,” “How Are You Doing?” to name a few—echo the best of veterans like Simic or Strand but pop with an updated disquietude, a low-key magic that conjures from familiar architecture new alcoves, new apses. Generous with style and energy, marked by a negative capability and a clarity of vision, Snyder’s poems don’t just move, they sweep us up with them.
Escape from Combray is out now from Ugly Duckling Presse.
