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.