Gabriel Gudding. Rhode Island Notebook. Dalkey Archive, 2007.

Review by Robbie Q. Telfer

Rhode Island Notebook begins as a gimmick: Gabriel Gudding has written this long poem while driving back and forth from his home in Normal, Illinois, where he teaches at Illinois State University, to Providence, Rhode Island, where his daughter and (ex)wife live. It is also – more or less – arranged by each trip with the date of their occurrence (from September 2002 to (at least) December 2004) as the section title. Every one of the twenty-six roundtrips are further broken into “to” and “from” segments labeled “[anabasis]” and “[katabasis]” and as the author footnotes: “Anabasis is a Greek word meaning Advance or the march up country. Katabasis conversely means retreat, and is sometimes used to describe a protagonist’s descent into hell.” – i.e. Providence is our hero’s battleground and Normal is occasionally Hell, so to speak. And besides being given lots of entendre to work with (e.g. his daughter, to whom the book is dedicated, is named after the muse of history) how American is it to have even our poets bleeding dry every waking moment through professional productivity? However, Gudding is deftly self-aware:

And so under the coming rime

a nebbish poet rode east

Across the snowed plains

between the perfect combines

and under combining doves

thinking of the family women

he love. 125 m fr. Normal

Because Gudding is so honest, resourceful, witty, he nimbly lifts Notebook clear of its gimmick and into an experience that is unique and universal and being American is precisely what the poet is on to:

I dislike pulling over to eat,

pee, defecate, and gas, and wd

prefer to cross this nation musing

in this almost bodiless way: but isn’t that

just very American of me: I believe in Angels

too! And wanna be one! Let’s incite

Armageddon

The poem becomes a kind of Defense of Comedy, a lens to view a world (and a life) that seems to endlessly defy logic. As Gudding states, “This notebook/and maybe indeed all honest lives are a/Study of Comedy.//Tragedy is thus comfort to the pompous;/Comedy to the humble.” Notebook is comfort and more to those who, like the author, seek meaning in a humorous, incongruous, maddening existence.

Gudding’s poem is filled with irony and satire which are, respectively, Boothian and Menippean – though angry, combative, mean, they are still inviting to the reader to join the chaotic, decentralized fray (unless the reader is a Conservative war-monger – and even then, the ridiculousness of some of his attacks would be hard to argumentatively respond to, hard not to laugh at). By leaving unsaid the degree to which he dislikes what he is satirizing, he exerts his personality and beliefs without slipping into didactic or opening himself up to dispute: “The old Nancy Reagan eagle is still/circling high, but circling in a/way we cannot understand… around/the great hole of her cannon fundament/are slim and flapping labia. Her labia/are thin as gong metal.” Here, the consenting to laughter invoked by this “ridiculousization” may do more to persuade than much straightforward rhetoric ever could – like Hitler arresting people for naming their horses “Adolph,” recognizing the power of the ridiculous. And if one does attempt to “counter” these “political points” s/he will end up looking as foolish as Tucker Carlson criticizing Jon Stewart’s satirical news show on Crossfire. And like Stewart, Gudding is making a case for practicing logic and kindness in life by strategically manipulating them in art:

Comedy & its relation to pain

is, I submit, the often only way

to awaken decency at a time

when portrayals of suffering

serve chiefly to aggrandize the heroic

and the emotional needs of state

nationalism.

###

1:35 PM – Dictator G W

Bush… I stick a knife

in his jaw and twist, spit in the wound

in his spit box. I shove powdered aluminum

in his jaw. HWY 71 N 355 m

1:40 PM and into his dumb

tooth hole I whisper “terrorist

backlash, Dubya, you dipscum peahead.”

Winter Storm Warning for Ohio

late Afternoon near Cincinnati

Then I dropped a new quarter in his wound

and turned his groin like a crank

He shuffled in place w/ his trousers wrinkling

Then peed his pants for the world to see

I put a small umbrella in his rectum

and opened it he said “Mmmff! It’s not

raining! it’s not misty in the abdomen! stop

it you terrust! I believe in my opinion

of basketball.

Mmmff!”

2:34 pm I GAS at Exit 187 71 N

at Ashland, OH at 421.8 M

10.118 g 428 M = 42.340 mpg

These surreal diatribes, always tethered to the drive, serve as a kind of psychic/literary road rage (“The Langpo movement was, in many ways, a/filibuster. The reading of the phone book/for 20 years.”) for delight, and for the galvanizing, solidifying of belief.

In his essay “Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People,” Tony Hoagland, another great comic poet, highlights the value of meanness in verse, “When a poem becomes aggressive, it rouses an excitement in us, in part because we see that someone has broken their social shackles.” Gudding’s particular meanness is more than just excitement-rousing: as the Iraq War is beginning, his marriage ending, meanness and comedy become necessary intellectual/moral/emotional survival tactics (“awakens decency”) at a time when the nation largely appears to have lost its goddamn mind. Hoagland goes on:

Meanness clears the air of sanctimony, falsehood, and denial, of our sentimental, ideological wishes about how things are alleged to be. Often, it recomplicates the issues. Because it does not intend to forgive nor ask forgiveness, because it does not imagine reconciliation as an end, meanness has an advantage over other kinds of discourse. Free of the complex accommodations required by “presenting a balanced view,” or Being Fair-Minded, opinion can fly with original, sometimes unerring force.

Gudding’s willingness to be mean allows him to transcend the potential for his subjects to become confessional. As the poem progresses, the meanness drops away in favor of kindness (except when speaking of Indiana), but the comedic mode, though tested, remains.

Notebook is the intersection (collision?) of Gudding’s selves: father, lover, (ex)husband; academic, poet; spiritual/political/historical American driver. Often he shifts between these roles rapidly. Likewise, there is much protean movement poetically – tonal, formic, altitudinal changes that occasionally blend but usually break the ankles. And whereas much (serious) poetry hopes to grab but a few of these subjects and voices at a time, Gudding mashes them all together – certainly how one experiences the aspects of a life – comically, never in a vacuum.

This model complicates itself as Gudding’s subject matter turns increasingly serious. Thus, the author “makes jokes” – incongruous juxtapositions (e.g. set-up, punchline) – but the “jokes” are heartbreaking rather than humorous. Just as Gudding removes his wedding ring and begins his divorce, he writes, “Am incredibly depressed. I/gave it my best shot./Quinnipac River 113 m/I tried my damnedest” and later, “God I’m sad. Something/dangling from that SUV,A/light on a wire.” Also, “Is music not Akin to sorcery/and what is night? There we go/crying again.” Here, the narrator’s wounds are so fresh, to insert too much Poetry (lyric, pithy observation, interpretation, beatifying, philosophy, etc…) would seem disingenuous. It’s hard to believe, but, like jokes about 9/11, there are even occasions where the sense-making of Poetry is “too soon.” Though, of course, by avoiding beauty, he captures it. Later, he is able to more thoughtfully, Poetically portray his comical, unfunny pain. In one trip to see his daughter, Gudding writes, “I am fairly certain/we were all once children.” And then a footnote:

Children and their icecreams, the sun swollen on their knuckles, the wind moving the dog fur, the dog moving the dog fur, a wind sneezing up the smell of puddles and mingling it in the scenes of sandwiches. There may not be any sleeping horses in the regions under the puddles, there may only be rotifers, paramecia, and nematoda. But so what. All the children smell and are in favor of the puddles– puddles are the butter of sunlight. Puddles are the humors of winds, the sinuses of wind. And children know this.

Perhaps under other context “puddles are the butter of sunlight” might be a very funny thing to see; here it functions differently. It’s not uncommon for satires to take a serious turn toward their end, but Gudding doesn’t sacrifice his voice or way of seeing to get to the emotional depths he reaches. Because over the course of this long poem we “get to know him” (in my experience, I found myself thinking through alternative highway routes that I wanted to discuss with him, was equally surprised by his occasionally poor gas mileage) Gudding is able to reinterpret American existence for us – in all its contradictions and pitfalls.