The Wasteland and Other Poems by John Beer

John Beer’s new book of poetry, The Wasteland and Other Poems, which came out in 2010 from Canarium books, begins with a quote from the Japanese-English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro that reads, “I obeyed the instructions as best I could, though the powerful gusts made it difficult to maintain a suitably genial expression on my face.” This book does begin by following the instructions set out by iconic poets like T. S. Eliot, but as we see right away Beer puts a procedural, and absurdist, spin on things. We recognize Beer’s inventiveness in the first section called the “Sound of Water Over Rock”. This idea of the music of water dripping on a rock comes right out of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, but in Beer’s poem it becomes an opportunity for a conceptual-procedural poem: we are given 7-word lines consisting of every variation and combination of the words “drip” and “drop.” Right away the reader senses this poem will tauntingly challenge Eliot’s intellectual elitism, as well as push on from Modernism to Post-modernism, harkening back to the absurd repetitions of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt.

The book tries on a number of, what it terms, “guises”. We have the guises of T. S. Eliot, the political poet, the surrealist-dream poet, etc., as well as different cloaks like the prose poem, the sonnet, the heroic couplet, and the free-verse poem. In the section “V. Death to Poetry” of “The Waste Land”, the speaker narrates a walk by Orpheus through the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. He walks past all of the stereotypes of modern urban society, the “anarchist kids”, Urdu-speaking cabdrivers, and underground “jazz stars”, and the speaker realizes they are not in Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or even an original poem. In instances like these, Beer seems to be saying that his poetry cannot represent the world or make a final judgment on it, but that poetry can only allow the world to sing its song through the poet.

The book is divided up into sections that are both self-contained sets of poems and parts that contribute to the book as a whole. The section “Sonnets to Morpheus” continues the dialogue on the nature of representation in poetry and the poet’s inability to represent even himself or herself, as the speaker explains

Can you really
breathe yourself into existence, touch the world,
and still leave a path for another to see?
Nobody told you to come here. There’s nobody here.

The sections “The Perfumed Crypt or Four Quartets in Eight Bits” and “Mary, the Color Scientist” contribute with discussions on aesthetics and beauty, which are topics that come up throughout the book.

John Beer’s “The Wasteland and Other Poems” takes on the ambitious task of parodying and satirizing T. S. Eliot’s monumental poem. Eliot’s poem is a work that most readers who are interested in poetry know thoroughly and intimately. Beer succeeds in finding new ways to address this poem by setting it in new places and incorporating a wider array of cultural artifacts than Eliot did - artifacts ranging from the rock band The Pixies to Barnes and Noble to Wittgenstein. However, at times, the book becomes a little too abstract and conceptual and loses its lyricism and musicality. In section 11 of “Theses of Failure”, which reads

Philosophers have only interpreted the world.

The point is too change it.

It will not be changed.

We get a pedantic and, to my mind, less interesting conceptual statement. Poetry, for me, is more powerful when in explores the concrete and brings us to meaning through that exploration. However, on the whole, the book was challenging, thought-provoking, aesthetically pleasing, and hilarious at times.

That This by Susan Howe

Susan Howe’s latest book published in 2010 by New Directions points us toward experiencing the contradiction between “feelings and thoughts”, “sounds and objects”. To accomplish this Howe tells us the story of her emotions, as well as records her associative philosophical musings, while grieving the death of her partner the philosopher Peter Hare. At the same time, she stitches in quotes from Sarah Edwards’s reaction to her famous husband Jonathan Edwards's death during the 18th century in New England. The book is divided up into three distinct sections: the first called “The Disappearance Approach” is in prose and includes Howe’s memories surrounding her husband’s death; the second are collages of cut-up sections of the diary of Hannah Edwards Whetmore (Jonathan’s younger sister) called “Frolic Architecture”. The collages were done with scissors, invisible tape and a photocopier. Each page is like a word sculpture. Each sculpture gives one the full experience of a poem in its conciseness, ambiguity, and strange affect. Howe’s method takes an unexciting (though Howe I suspect would vehemently disagree with me) eighteenth century diary entry and transforms it into a visually edifying and linguistically complex object. The last section “That This”, named after the book’s title, for the most part is comprised of couplets, though there are a couple formal deviations. This section has various mediations on presence and absence, lightness and darkness

Day is a type when visible
objects change then put

on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed

One is brought into the experience of losing a loved partner through the visual, which in this case includes poetic form as well as poetic image. Howe is truly a poet of expansive formal and philosophical range of which this book is an apt example. That she will come out with another moving and challenging book, I am quite sure.

The Network by Jena Osman

The title of the first section of The Network, "The Knot", is entirely appropriate because the book is a knotting together of seemingly disparate strands of historical, social and cultural knowledge. The book luxuriantly wades through a discussion of Osman's poetics, the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, the iconic nature of The Joker, the Franklin Artic exposition, and the volcanic American financial system. Osman's exploration and teezing-out of language in the book is a direct manifestion of her poetic method, which she lays out in the opening pages: "I follow Cecilia Vicuna's instruction to use an etymological dictionary: "'To enter words in order to see.'" She charts the etymology of certain terms like Security, Credit, Money, and Peace which have nearly lost all meaning in the American idiom, in order to create a multiplicity of meanings. By her method she begins to unravel the roots of our current economic and social woes. The Network combines documentary, prose, conceptual and lyrical poetry and applies them to subjects that should be examined in-depth in our media, but never are. The result is an revelatory experience on the part of the reader, which refutes W. H. Auden's notion that "poetry makes nothing happen." With this book one feels that the techtonic plates of language have shifted in unexpected and influential ways.