Last Wednesday, when I was demonstrating that a ten year old could write better than some work offered by the School of Quietude, and used Geoffrey Brock as my example, I conceded that I was being unfair: “there are Brock poems that are actually quite good.” I think it makes sense to point to an example of this also, and to say a little why I think it’s exemplary, even tho it’s certainly SoQ to the max.

My favorite Brock poem is a recent piece entitled “Exercitia Spiritualia,” published in Deborah Ager’s zine, 32 Poems. What it does with rhyme would – should – impress any fan of Oulipo.

We met, like lovers in movies, on a quay

Beside the Seine. I was reading Foucault

And feeling smart. She called him an assault 

On sense, and smiled. She was from Paraguay,

Was reading Saint  Ignatius. Naivete

Aroused her, so she guided me to Chartres

And Sacre Coeur, to obscure theatres

For passion plays - she was my exegete.

In Rome (for Paris hadn't been enough)

We took a room, made love on the worn parquet,

Then strolled to Sant'Ignazio. Strange duet:

Pilgrim and pagan, gazing, as though through

That ceiling's flatness, toward some epitome

Of hoped-for depth. I swore I saw a  dome.

 

This is the first strategy for an A-B-B-A rhyme scheme, to call it that, that could make me envision wanting to read a long poem in it, at least until the deadening metrics overcome me like so much carbon monoxide. Sonnet-sized, tho, they don’t detract.

This is rhyme at the level of the graphic signifier, not the audible one, exploiting a feature within English’s notorious pliability to demonstrate the ongoing slide between sound, sense & visual representation. While there is nothing here that could be called opaque, as such, the scandal of opacity – representation’s ultimate failure-from-within – lurks everywhere.

Another poem, I find effective, but problematic, is “Hopes for My Daughter,” which appeared in The Hudson Review in Winter, 2003:

I hope that, once or twice, she's chosen last.

I hope that some friend's trusted smile

Proves false, and that when she betrays a trust

She hates herself a while.

I hope a handsome good-for-nothing boy

Bruises her heart when her heart's strong.

I hope she isn't granted each wished-for joy,

Occasionally is wrong,

And learns firsthand what loss is, and regret.

I hope she faces prejudice.

I hope her world will still need saving - yet

Not be as dire as this.

I hope her father's flaws are, in her eyes,

Flaws. And if she has children too

If anyone still does - I hope she dies

Before the children do.

 

The variable line lengths soften the predictability of the rhyme scheme enough so that one focuses first on the content, a poem that echoes works by such disparate souls as Robert Creeley & Weldon Kees. The trick is that, like Kees, Brock has no daughter. The poem is also an exercise in speculative fiction. That detail, I suspect, also elevates the layers of irony at work in the final lines.

Yet this latter poem is also filled with eyebrow-raising clichés – trusted smile, handsome good-for-nothing boy – and language added just to pad out lines (handsome good-for-nothing again, but also If anyone still does). My experience has been that the more times you read this poem, the larger & more gaping these flaws seem, so that the power of the initial reading is followed by a series of progressively larger disappointments. Still, the power of that first reader cannot & should not be denied.

When I contrast these two poems with the cringingly bathetic piece I ran last Wednesday, it demands an act of imagination to conceive that they were written by the same human being. Yet there must exist some place, some perspective, from which all three make a kind of sense that is compelling enough for Brock to put his name to all three.

So while I would actually agree with Curtis Faville’s point from the Comments trail the other day that School of Quietude poetry is not necessarily always bad poetry, my own conclusion is that the tradition offers a framework that perpetually invites the mawkish, the overstuffed, the conflation of pattern with form. Great SoQ poems are being written, but almost invariably it is in spite of the tradition from which they arise.