THE SWIMMER
Gliding long and easy
between strong, fluid strokes
(nipping air
from his collarbone's cup)
it's as if he could swim
forever, a water-beast
born to this, not foreign
as he is, exacting
by artifice suspension of his body
and the water's disbelief.
from THE FULL ROUND
Fiddlehead Books
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REPLY TO AN EVICTION NOTICE
My mother and father camped in such apartments/
in their time, landlord, promoter
of cramped endurances,
your rightful inheritance. Your father
purchased shrewdly and practiced ungiving/
well. Mine did not.
So my sweaty bursts of living
are managed in rooms
gauged like parking meters, narrow as coin slots,/
while from the landscaped, architect-designed/
vantage of your home,
the town lies before you like a Monopoly board./
Ownership is your reward
and punishment; movement mine.
from ONCE YOU LEARN YOU NEVER FORGET
Fiddlehead Poetry Books
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FOR BIRDS
Born beside an aviary,
our first child's talk
began as crow caaas.
Now three, she flies
about the yard
while her sister tries
to escape her walker,
flapping her arms
like a frantic gull.
With our care
and watching outward
we help them choose
the flight we made;
teach them to use
wings to accept the air,
and this picked branch,
the wide sky's root,
for jumping off.
What strange birds we seem --
sheltering from cats and wind
in a nest all openings.
from THE FULL ROUND
Fiddlehead Poetry Books
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COLLECTED STORIES by Raymond Chandler, Everyman's Library, 2002, Reviewed by Robert Flanagan
LOVELY LADIES WITH PRETTY PISTOLS
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) helped to revolutionize modern American crime fiction. Rescuing the detective story from the stuffy confines of the manorial drawing room and from urbane know-it-alls in smoking jackets like Philo Vance, he took it to the streets of Los Angeles and put it in the hard hands of street-wise, wise-cracking private eyes like Philip Marlowe.
All of his hard-boiled stories, originally published in Black Mask magazine in the 1930’s, can be found in Everyman’s Library’s fat new volume of Chandler’s Collected Stories.
The stories display Chandler’s strong sense of place, great ear for dialogue, talent for the bon mot, and knack for cranking out scenes of dead pan violence. He focuses on character more than on plot, and his cynical, yet romantic, narrators keep the pace rapid and the perceptions keen.
Even so, these are dated formula pieces. From “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” (1933) to “English Summer” (1974), the same plots and character types appear again and again. Women like Rhonda Farr have voices like “iced velvet,” gun thugs like Erno have mustaches “shiny like satin,” and a hero like Mallory has “a rather sensitive mouth” and hair that is ‘crisp and black, ever so faintly touched with grey, as though by an almost diffident hand.” (That “almost diffident hand” phrase is an example of the affected literary touch in the prose, which occurs along with vague but toney modifiers such as “quite,” “rather”and “somewhat.”)
As a stylist Chandler can turn out a description as simple and efficient as a rifle bolt. “Jim, the grey-haired cop, was asleep or still unconscious. The side of his head was stiff with congealed blood. The skin of his face was a dirty grey.”
But he also can burden a sentence with figurative doo-dads. “Beautiful hands are as rare as jacaranda-trees in bloom, in a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in stockings.” Picture that.
Black Mask gave its readers the stereotypes they wanted, and despite Chandler’s attempts to reach higher, his stories remain rooted in pulp formulae. His characters do things “with a smooth gesture, a hint of drama,” and when they speak they do so “coldly,” “nastily” and “shrilly.” They have “thick sneers” and “thin smiles.” Their world is one of melodrama. Tension, especially sexual, runs so high in the cocktail sipping scenes between suspect and sleuth that it comes as a relief when someone barges in to blow holes in walls and people.
And if a character shows up who is fat, female, gay or wealthy, watch out. The villain has arrived.
Chandler once remarked that when the action of a scene slowed he brought in a man with a gun. In his stories this seems more fact than joke. In the climactic scene of “Blackmailers Don’t’ Shoot” so many bad and good cops, gunsels and thugs, and languid ladies with small pearl-handled semi-autos enter and exit the room to crack wise, swing saps and squeeze triggers that the action resembles the state room scene from the contemporaneous Marx Brothers movie “A Night at the Opera.”
Still, in the pantheon of crime writers Chandler ranks right below Dashiel Hammett, author of classic The Thin Man and the incomparable The Glass Key. But it is his novels that put him there, not his stories.
Chandler himself, in an introductory note to “The Pencil,” a late story that was “written especially for England,” states that for many years he had consistently refused to write short stories because he thought novels were his natural form.
He was right.
Although his next to last book The Long Goodbye might better have been titled The Way Too long Goodbye, the novels Farewell, My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake, and the peak of his achievement The Big Sleep all reward rereading.
Simultaneously with Chandler’s Collected Stories Everyman Library is publishing two omnibus editions of his seven novels. Unless readers are addicted to the snarling noir of a beginner, they should skip the stories and stick to the novels.
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POEMS SEVEN: NEW AND COMPLETE POETRY, Alan Dugan, Seven Stories Press, 2001, Reviewed by Robert Flanagan
THE CRAFT AND WRATH OF ALAN DUGAN
Sing, Goddess, of the wrath of Dugan, a hard knock bard who held fast to his craft and all career-long stood an independent outsider to the passing fads of contemporary poetry! Sing of his stoic joy, independent spirit and gift for oracular song, both tough and true.
Because a new collection of Alan Dugan's poems is cause for celebration. Author of POEMS, POEMS TWO, POEMS THREE, etc, on up to his new 400 plus page POEMS SEVEN: NEW AND COMPLETE POETRY, Alan Dugan has carved out one of the richest, yet relatively unheralded careers in contemporary American poetry. A literary maverick, Dugan is brutally honest, skeptical and yet celebratory in poems that are terse and formal, and timeless in their treatment of daily life as seen in the light of legend and classical tradition. (Three of his poem titles may serve to suggest his skeptical, stoic and underdog point of view: "On A Myth: On Conventional Wisdom;" "What Happened? What Do You Expect?" and "On Being Out-Classed by Class.")
As poet Louise Gluck wrote in The Threepenny Review: "Where another more solemn poet takes on or offers up apocalyptic truth or elevated perception, Dugan deals in the goods: vice, guile, hunger, deception, stasis."
He's able to write so close to the bone because professionally his deep love of classical poetry inoculated him to the various and ephemeral poetry schools (think fish): confessional, deep image, and the (oddly redundant) language poetry, and personally he refused to believe in society's conformist mind set: "...they said: `There/ are only two sides to a question; to/ propose a third is treason if true.'" (The Crimes Of Bernard) That final twist -- "if true" -- is quintessential Dugan.
Dugan is blessed (or cursed) with the ability to see through to the gritty reality often hidden in the gauzy mists of myth, yet has the heart to celebrate the courage and heroism of history's usual losers. "Even if a man has been/ chopped down to be/ a basket case and has/ gone mad with it, he/ doesn't lack honor nonetheless..." (On Visiting A Veterans Hospital.)
In his poem "On Hurricane Jackson" such bifocal vision reveals both the pathos and brutality of a modern boxer's fate while at the same viewing it as a parallel to classical heroism.
Although now the boxer's nose is broken and
"one eye/ will not focus and the other is a stray..." and "trainers whisper in his mouth while one ear/ listens to itself, clenched like a fist;/" "his perfect youth,/ laureled in newsprint and dollar bills,/ trimphs forever on the great white way/ to the statisical Sparta of the champs."
Dugan knows and accepts the fact that time both mocks and enshrines our heroes, that time finally will have its way with us all. "Miniature Greek gods support the Roman hour/ having nothing else to do, or hold/ some dead white grapes to girlish smiles/ as the time runs round in a gold ring." (from On a Baroque Clock)
Yet there is never a mournful tone to his work. Rather he seems to delight in history's absurdities.
His poems are filled with deadpan humor and the titles alone might be worth the price of the book: "What the Hell, Rage, Give in to Natural Graces;" "His Hands Have Five Knives Each;" "Funeral Oration for a Mouse;" "Memory of Old Forms Under Hell's Angels;" "Death's Chicken, Named Amelia;" "Fabrication of Ancestors;" "Speech to the Student Clowns at the Circus Clown School at Sarasota, Florida;" "Perverse Explanation for Mutilated Statuary;" "Monologue for a Sixth Avenue Screamer;" "Oxymoronic Hospital Blues."
So let us celebrate these collected poems, Homeric in power and range, bawdy as those of Catullus, and edged with the razor wit of Juvenal.
There are more famous poets than Alan Dugan but none better.
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CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE NOVEL, CONNECTED ESSAYS by David Lodge, Harvard, 2202, Reviewed by Robert Flanagan
THINKING FICTION
It’s no surprise that British novelist and critic David Lodge should publish Consciousness and the Novel, “connected essays” on the portrayal and role of consciousness in fiction. The characters who inhabit his own comic novels of class and cultural conflict, Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work, are highly self-conscious beings, and his most recent novel, Thinks…, is, as one might expect, about someone thinking. (Its heroine Helen Reed, a novelist and lapsed Catholic, thinks, but not like the man with whom she’s involved, an atheistic cognitive scientist, thinks she thinks.)
What links Lodge’s eleven essays is the premise that literature is “a record of human consciousness, the richest and most comprehensive that we have” and that it is “complementary to scientific knowledge.”
Citing the works of a broad range of writers from Jane Austen to Nicholson Baker, Charles Dickens to John Updike, and Virginia Woolf to Philip Roth, as well as taking into account the writings of Soren Kierkegaard and numerous neurobiologists and psychologists, Lodge examines how the novel represents consciousness; how such representation has changed over time; how the novelist’s consciousness and unconsciousness function creatively; and what, if any, is the role of the critic’s formal analysis in the process.
All this may sound like heavy going, but it’s not. Pieces such as “Bye-Bye Bech,” “Henry James and the Movies,” and “Waugh’s Comic Wasteland” are lively verbal performances marked by psychological insight and scalpel sharp wit.
One reason Lodge’s creative and critical works are such joys to read is the sense of play in them. “Writers discover what they want to say in the process of saying it,” he says, and in his own works it’s evident he had fun in their discovery.
The essay “Kierkegaard for Special Purposes” is a shortened version of an address Lodge delivered at an international conference of scholars in Copenhagen. (In a prefatory note Lodge confesses to never discovering the meaning of the conference title, “Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It.”) Was he invited to speak there because of being an expert on Fear and Trembling? No. Rather because the main character of his novel Therapy, Tubby Passmore, a depressed writer, refuses to crank out another season of his hit TV sitcom “The People Next Door” unless the network produces his movie of the week script on the life of depressed Copenhagen philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.
Lodge is a writer’s critic. He knows the creative process from the inside out and does not, when working outside-in as a critic of fiction, presume analysis to be superior to synthesis. Rather, he approaches the literary work under scrutiny with respect for its different form of knowledge. His essay “Literary Criticism and Literary Creation” ought to be required reading for all graduate students in English as part of their education in enjoyment, as should his earlier essay collection The Art of Fiction.
He is not anti-critical however. In The Practice of Writing, another of his essay collections, he shows appreciation of deconstructionist guru Jacques Derrida and employs Mikhail Bakhtin’s thought in a structuralist reading of a Harold Pinter play.
Nor does Lodge pretend to special knowledge as a novelist. “Readers of novels often assume that the knowledge of a particular subject displayed in their pages must be the visible tip of a submerged iceberg of information, when in fact there often is no iceberg – the tip is all there is.”
Here’s a tip: If you like being in smart company get to know David Lodge.
