Saving the
best for last, our postal carrier delivered John Godfrey’s Private
Lemonade, just out from Adventures in Poetry.
Considering that the website lists the book among its 2001-2002 publications
(and the book’s page gives the date of April 2003), I shouldn’t quibble – it’s
an utterly gorgeous publication, with the look & feel one expects from a
high-end trade publisher, not a small press that still puts forward magazines
that carry the weight of staples. AiP’s strategy, very obviously, is to pick
the right vehicle for the job at hand & here it’s done as well as humans
can do it.
I’ve never been
a great fan of the abstract lyric, in part because there are so very few poets
who do it really well. Not every poem in Private
Lemonade qualifies as an abstraction but, where they do, Godfrey’s poems
offer a master class in how to
produce texts in ways that seem effortless & yet have incredible impact.
Here, almost at random, is “That Place Anymore”
To be learned
from but not
to believe
Influence
surroundings
demonically
Even your
sarcasm shows
you loyal
Twelve strings
Sympathetic
yellow jello
Your hand brush
ashes from
my eyebrows
That is just
horrible
Have a seat
The key
phrase in this poem, the one without which it would all unravel, is, I swear,
“yellow jello.” It occurs precisely at the point where the reader has to decide
whether or not to create a figurative schema that will render the whole of what
has gone before into a plausible narrative. Right at the instant when we most
expect one key, crystallizing detail, Godfrey spoons up something very
different indeed. The internal rhyme accentuates the device.*
The poem
has a second decisive moment right at the very end of the very next line, just
as archly slanted as the sudden appearance of jello. The word brush sounds
as tho it is missing a syllable – is it? The fact that -es turns up in the very next word again is a form aural
accentuation, but here Godfrey is very carefully not giving us any particular
clues. In letting the reader hear the
syllable’s absence, he gives it & takes it away all in one motion, a sort
of sonic translucency that occurs in the mind rather than the mouth of a
reader. That absent -es triggers a
transformation in the poem – it stops being description & monolog &
turns as a speech type into a dialog. Indeed, everything in the final tercet is
quoted speech. The your & you that have turned up previously now
are foregrounded. It’s a rather remarkable literary effect – as if the lens of
the poem has suddenly zoomed in, casting everything into new contexts.
Some
readers can find narrative anywhere – and this poem is, in fact, more
figurative than many in Private Lemonade.
One can build, for example, from ashes
from / my eyebrows & read the poem from this point backwards as now
suddenly “about” the collapse of the
And in
poetry today, that still seems to be a very difficult leap to make. In painting,
one might imagine as an analog of this sort of lyric a painting, say, by David
Salle, one of those canvases in which the various sections are doing different
things, so that one corner might be “realistic” where another is still
figurative but heavily stylized and still another portion of the canvas is
completely abstract. If, and I
suspect only if, one attempts to render “That Place Anymore” as narrative or at
least figurative, then it seems to me that one has also to admit the
possibility of a “simple” poem just this complex, that different stanzas may
ultimately play by radically dissimilar rules. (One might then argue that the
purpose of a set stanzaic form serves precisely to yoke these divergent
impulses under a common exoskeleton, to provide a soft unity over the
harder-edged diversity beneath.)
But if one
reads it instead without worrying does
this fit (which invariably means does
this make a master narrative?), then all of these lines function more like
others that one cannot even imagine as referential – “Charcoal highlight
dubiety” or “Teen chest warm spells” – so that one then arrives instead at a
very different understanding of what abstraction might be & how it might
work. This is because individual lines, phrases, whole stanzas can be abstract
in Godfrey’s poetry, but they are seldom sans syntax. This puts Godfrey very
much in the camp of abstraction I associate with the likes of Joe Ceravolo
& Clark Coolidge, rather than, say, Sheila E. Murphy, Bob Harrison or Peter
Ganick. The presence of syntax, even in broken snatches, permits the language
to lift & twist in ways that go beyond what is possible through the mere
juxtaposition of unexpected phrase neighbors. To return to the analogy of
painting for a minute, it’s as if one set of painters worked the canvas
fabulously as a two dimensional surface (think Malevich & Kandinsky), where
the others used oil to cause their brush strokes to literally rise up off of
the surface & to provide literally a third dimension (think Johns, Pollock,
even that moment in Frank Stella’s work where it transforms from his black or
gray “lines” to gaudily overbright protractor sculptures that jut out from the
wall, sometimes in such materials as cardboard, metal or felt). Godfrey &
Ceravolo in particular use syntax to get that sense of “lift.” One result is
that I suspect some people will read Private
Lemonade the way Peter Schjeldahl once claimed to read Ceravolo:
I rarely know what he is
talking about, but I can rarely gainsay a word he uses. Nor do I doubt that
every word is in felt contact with actual experience beyond the experience of
words.**
You can
read Private Lemonade like that. But,
if you do, you’re missing at least half of the fun.
* But how
many readers will hear the reiteration of phonemes from the last line of the
previous tercet: you loyal?
** “Cabin
Fever,” in
