Anti-Palinurus

Since finding Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave by accident in a used book store last year, I've had the vague sense that it is a foil for my poetics.

V. S. Pritchett's blurb pegs it as "a modern egotist's anthology" and Connolly himself says in the introduction that its plot turns on "the core of melancholy and guilt that works destruction on us from within." It's main strength is really to present this mood, without (convincingly) arguing for its validity.

Connolly published The Unquiet Grave under the pseudonym Palinurus. I want to say that the poetry that I'm reading these days, the poetry that pleases me, is strongly marked by anti-palinuroid tendencies (turning a phrase from Connolly's postscript). Palinurus was Aeneas' pilot; and my contact with contemporary American poetry begins precisely with Tony Tost's "I Am Not the Pilot".

A few weeks back, there was a bit of an incident about calling my aesthetic response to this poem "flarfy". I want now to suggest that it was really anti-palinurian, though it's an unhappy term (negative contrast). To show what I mean, consider a poem of Ben Lerner's from The Lichtenberg Figures, also published in Ploughshares (Winter 2002-3):

I’m going to kill the president.
I promise. I surrender. I’m sorry.
I’m gay. I’m pregnant. I’m dying.
I’m not your father. You’re fired.
Fire. I forgot your birthday.
You will have to lose the leg.
She was asking for it.
It ran right under the car.
It looked like a gun. It’s contagious.
She’s with God now.
Help me. I don’t have a problem.
I’ve swallowed a bottle of aspirin.
I’m a doctor. I’m leaving you.
I love you. Fuck you. I’ll change.

First, recall the Palinurian plot -- "the core of melancholy and guilt that works destruction on us from within" -- and recognize the sense in which this poem seems to actively engage with and deconstruct it (or just takes it apart). Second, consider the following very Palinurian sentiment:

We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent. We cannot co-ordinate what is not there. (Connolly, p. 2)

I think Ben Lerner and Tony Tost are saying (and doing) the very opposite. They refuse to lament their point of departure. More importantly, they will not allow the reader to valorize the act of simply reading a poem. The "materials" that are used in Lerner's poem are as "cheap" as anything we find in journalism, but the effect of putting them together as he does is, I would say, permanent. He co-ordinates what is there.

This application of ostensibly cheap materials to poetry, I suspect, is also what I immediately appreciate in Kasey Mohammad's Deer Head Nation.