RECOVERY PROJECT


Recovery Project is a modest attempt by the editors of Octopus to swing some attention towards overlooked books of the last 30 or so years.

Good News by Greg Kuzma
Audubon: A Vision by Robert Penn Warren

Good News
Greg Kuzma
Viking Press, 1973

Kuzma is toying with the idea of giving us an entire book with all of his secrets - a feat he will accomplish with grace in the years following Good News. In this 1973 output though I'd say we have been given only a smattering of it, a hint of confession despite some trepidation. He goes back and forth between something like pulling us into a dark quiet corner confessing to us his secrets and fears, and delighting us with a story at a party.

If I could, I'd rename this collection Halloween, and Other Poems, in part because "Halloween" is narrowly the most powerful poem here, which I'll get to shortly, but also because Halloween, the holiday, is about masking and the unmasking. Good Newsis somewhere between both, trying to define itself and its author. In "My Grandfather Dies", something very unmasking, "I sit in the tub and almost cry./I never planned for you to die./This is the way things happen in my life./Things never reach me in time."

But in the poem immediate following, "My Grandfather Dies Again", he scraps the honesty bit and blinds us with a variety of different possible deaths. None of which, except perhaps the ending which reads "And then you killed yourself", is true. Here, though, are three of the possibilities that are meant to throw us off course, to mask the speaker and prevent us maybe from getting too close:

As you drank you grew smaller.
Till you fell into the bottle
and drowned.

Nobody ever loved you
and that was the reason you died.
Because you butchered the language
we butchered you in our dreams.
You pushed mashed potatoes onto your fork
with your thumb, so
we buried you under the mashed potatoes.

In "Advice on Reading the Confessional Poet," Kuzma seems to be telling us beware, not to trust, and not to give him/her (the 3^rd party confessional poet) the satisfaction that what he/she is writing is worthwhile. In fact, Kuzma concludes the poem with "Do not react", reminding us that the best medicine to ward off crybabies, drama queens, and the selfish conversationalist, is to ignore them. It's as if though Kuzma is juggling around the idea of becoming a confessional poet himself, or considering the sobering idea that he might be becoming one, even though Kuzma's confessed tribulations are far less dramatic, less carnal, than this poem would warn us about - his seem to be more about the loss of precious time. And the warning is right there in the exact middle of the book (poem 28 of 56). A deliberate focal point - the poetic nucleus.

No place is safe he says.
Nothing finally to cherish,
He wriggles on the page,
His mouth purple from the painful words.

So, this is the place in time, 1973, where Kuzma's poetry is taking off its long sleeved tee and putting on its knit sweater. Where he climbs out of false experiment and hesitantly dips his big toe into the cold waters of honest and revealing auto-biography. This is exactly what Halloween means to me - the very transition of it - and another reason why the entire collection should take Halloween as its name. It's leaves-to-snow. It's the day I begin to grow my beard wild in the cold until St. Patty's.

As promised: the poem, "Halloween", embodies this transition all by itself. He does in one brilliant poem what the whole collection does. It begins with innocent poetic fun, like the innocent fun of holidays themselves, and at midnight (in the poem), Kuzma reveals to us his fears - specifically, of the rapid passage of time.

All afternoon we played in popcorn
and dipped apples. I cut the pumpkin
to your smile and wore the lid
like a weird hat. The air was stiff
with autumn, and the night came
tilting when it came, as if we'd
made it come. The kids were grateful,
coming back five times to see your
costume, an old sweatshirt on which
you'd drawn me with a beard.
I played spoons and sang some
recipes we hadn't used for anything.
But after midnight something scared us
into sleep. The house looked grim
with shadows when I walked into
the pumpkin's stare. In dreams
that night I lost you far against
the moon, your hair grown long as branches,
your voice like a lost wolf's.
Our cats had turned to bones beneath the stairs,
I woke to feel my body creak,
and every door I opened held
a skeleton or some old friend.

The poem takes a dramatic turn at "But after midnight". Kuzma becomes scared into sleep at the passage of time. It is the sleeping that he dreads. By sleeping, Kuzma will lose those close to him. By sleeping, Kuzma will arrive too quickly at his own creaking body and the skeletons of those he has loved. He must become hyper-aware which is evident in the other poems, to capture and cherish and remember every moment, whether it be celebratory or tragic.

Like in James Tate's well-anthologized poem "The Diagnosis", Kuzma has been told he'll die in forty years or so, and begins to drift. It is the drifting that he fears. In "The Aged", he scares us all.

The penis dries up like a scab.
The chin sags its extra foot
to brace the head. Mouths agape,
we collapse along the road like fenceposts.
Men from museums come by in trucks
and sort us out, looking for the
best specimens.

When you return I will provide
for you. I promise. I will
stop yelling at you. I will
stop screwing up my face
when you trip on words or things.
At night I will rake sleep
over you. Mornings I will
climb up the tree of morning
and declare the day sweet.
Each day will be sweet.

Zach Schomburg

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10."Fuck the Astronauts," James Tate
9. "Tamar," Robinson Jeffers
8. Noon, Cole Swensen
7. China Trace, Charles Wright
6. RADI OS, Ronald Johnson
5. "The Glass Essay," Anne Carson
4. "In Memory of My Feelings," Frank O'Hara
3. "The Shape of the Fire," Theodore Roethke
2. "Route," George Oppen
1. AUDUBON: A VISION, Robert Penn Warren

The longish poem is a wonderful form - the poem that doesn't aspire to be epic (it can be read in one sitting) but doesn't settle for being "just" a lyric. The list above is merely a spur-of-the-hour list of some of my personal favorites of this nebulous genre. If I were to expand the list to non-American work, I'd include Basil Bunting's Briggflatts, Seamus Heaney's "Squarings" or Jaime Saenz's "Night" (translation forthcoming in Octopus 3), among others. For quite a while, Robert Penn Warren's Audubon has been my favorite of this personal genre - it is a mostly narrative poem, but is also strangely tangential, both intimate and grandiose. It's a very odd poem, written by a man at the peak of his powers; my friend Nic has referred to Warren as a personal model: an American man-of-letters. I think Audubon is compelling evidence for this view: the very learned man-of-letters at the height of his expressive powers investigating compelling, strange, relevant subject matter.

(Personal note: I was pointed to Audubon by Dave Smith, who visited my MFA program for a week during my first semester there. During our hour-long conference, it was immediately clear that my own work wouldn't be very rich subject matter for us ["Tony, the only advice I can give you is this: stop what you're doing"], so we discussed writers we both admired, such as Charles Wright and Kenneth Rexroth. Mr. Smith suggested that I read Audubon, for which I am very grateful. A later supplement to my appreciation was Cal Bedient's excellent In the Heart's Last Kingdom: Robert Penn Warren's Major Poetry.)

Robert Penn Warren's writing in this poem is wonderful, a sort of Southern Baroque in its flourishes:

                  October: and the bear,
                  Daft in the honey-light, yawns.

                  The bear's tongue, pink as a baby's out-crisps to the curled tip,
                  It bleeds the black blood of the blackberry.

Muscular clarity. The poem follows Audubon in a nightmare narrative as he stumbles into the domestic sphere of a woman (and to a lesser degree, her sons) who seems to embody human nature's, or just nature's, or perhaps (by extension) the Lord's, penchant for cruelty. This nightmare is rendered with clarity, and Warren doesn't flinch, nor does he deny the sometimes-awful beauty of such a dark, almost child-like world. And he allows all this strangeness to reside not just in his telling but in the events themselves. In the following excerpt, the woman comes for Audubon's gold watch in the night:

With no sound, she rises. She holds it in her hand.
Behind her the sons rise like shadow. The Indian
Snores. Or pretends to.

                                    He thinks: "Now."

                                                            And knows

He has entered the tale, knows
He has entered the dark hovel

In the forest where trees have eyes, knows it is the tale
They told him when he was a child, knows it
Is the dream he had in childhood but never
Knew the end of, only
The scream.

Audubon is fully a narrative of Audubon the man, but it is also much more, and it does not settle for explaining everything it embodies. It welcomes questions about identity, divinity, aesthetics and morality without offering comforting answers. I feel it is an exemplary example of the Dark Sublime that is faced, and rendered, in some of the best writers our country has claimed, from Melville to Jeffers, from Frank Stanford to Rosmarie Waldrop and William Bronk (the Dark Sublime as void). Audubon also offers a model for the writer who wants to fully engage with the world and the tradition, who wants to produce works of rich, rewarding complexity and clarity without resorting to derivative mannerisms or formulas. I think it is the kind of poem that can only be the product of a lifetime's apprenticeship to the English language. Lord knows I cannot conceive of myself writing such a poem, at least not for decades.

I am always rereading Audubon, and arguing with it. It's a poem with the most interesting erection I have discovered in American literature. It's also a terrific introduction, or re-introduction, to a writer who, though a famous name, is too often overlooked in discussions of 20^th century masters.

Tony Tost

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