Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     Over the last few years, several English publishers have been introducing us to the work of new American poets. In each case they have to consider whether a poet is better served by the publication of all of his or her life’s work at once, or by a more piecemeal approach that leads readers more gradually into poetry which is quite often very different from what they are used to. Faber’s Simic and Bloodaxe’s Williams, for instance, come in a Selected here and a collection there, while in the case of Frank Bidart, Carcanet have decided to publish in toto his poetry to date. Given the particular shape of Bidart’s oeuvre, it was probably the correct decision, but there are drawbacks. Since 1973, when he published his first collection Golden State, Bidart has evolved into a very original poet indeed, whose techniques and angles of attack are like no one else’s. American readers have had two decades to accustomise themselves with each phase of his development; while British or Irish readers, if they begin with the first pages of this volume, will find themselves in very strange territory. Perhaps the most helpful piece of advice, then, to the prospective reader is to go against the arrangement of this book and stick with chronology. The reader then can follow the development of his experiments with typography and narrative; can follow the ever more complex connections that are made between biography and autobiography through his use of personae; and can follow a path of gradual ascent to the vertiginous heights which are at the centre of his poetry.

     To take typography first. With a poet like Cummings, typographical innovation always seems added on, a clever piece of avant-garde frippery to impress the Maxwell Bodenheims of this world. Bidart, on the other hand, has pushed against the typographic conventions in order to be more accurate in transcribing the cadencing and rhythms of the human voice. It acts like a musical score, by times emphasising, giving nuance, and when needed thundering. For instance:

But then,—
                      he LEARNED SOMETHING.

He learned that

                      All life exists

at the expense of other life . . .

When he began to succeed,
he saw that he was AMBITIOUS,—

Now while this shows some of Bidart’s trademarks (the gesture of offering forth that the comma and em-dash provide, the capitals flaming forth from the page, the softer insistence of the italics), it might also seem to some readers to be so much melodramatic tosh, the height of which is the ominous “LEARNED SOMETHING”, which intimates profundities, but doesn’t name them. But then I’m starting with the deep end: these moments are convincing only if they are approached through the preceding narratives.

     Of which it must be said that they are compelling and bizarre. The strangest has got to be ‘The First Hour of the Night’ in which a man goes to visit the son of an old friend who has died. He comes to the house, has a conversation with the son about the confusions and feelings of release that accompany the death of a father. There is a gothic feel to this, somewhat similar to ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. The speaker goes to bed and has the ‘DREAM OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY’, which goes on for twenty-six pages and examines questions of ethics, ontology and personal relations, through a meditation on Raphael’s ‘School of Athens’. How does the first half of the poem hold together with the second? Tenuously on the face of it, but for some reason it works. Perhaps it’s the tone – equanimous, trustworthy, precise – that makes it cohere. Perhaps it’s the way that the later philosophical questions take up some of the issues the narrator discussed with the son of his deceased friend. Although the second part is a dream proper, the whole poem shimmers like an apparition. What also makes the poem more compelling is Bidart’s handling of voice: it reads with all the conviction of a confessional poem, as though these were the experiences of Bidart himself, although we assume they weren’t. This is a general feature of his work. Even when he speaks through a persona the reader doesn’t feel safely within the clutches of inverted commas. In his first book, Bidart takes the voice of a brutal murderer, and the tone is so persuasive one wonders whether Bidart hasn’t knocked off a few people himself.

     But why should this type of intensity recommend poetry to us after all we’ve had from the Confessionals? For one reason. Lowell, Berryman and the others bring you to moments of psychological intensity, but always remind you that it was they who experienced it. To put it another way, they are interested less in the intensities themselves than in dramatic presentation of the poet facing them. Bidart was a close friend of Lowell’s and for many years now has been engaged in the difficult task of editing his collected poems. While Lowell’s example has been instructive, Bidart turns in a different direction. He spends many pages in his longer poems narrating the stories of a motley collection of lives – Vaslav Nijinsky; a patient of the existential psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger; a murderer; Bidart’s mother and father; Bidart himself – but all this novelistic data of what happened to whom and when and where falls away once the precipice at the edge of human identity is reached. Once there, the question of whether it’s Bidart or the murderer Herbert White narrating is irrelevant. For this is his enduring subject. He asks what meaning does the course of a life have? What is it to choose to turn away from it (as the speaker of one poem does)? To make a mess of it (as his parents do)? What constitutes human identity? What does having a body mean? Like no one else writing at the moment, Bidart has found the ways to ask those questions and convey their import. It could all so easily collapse into a heap of mouldering platitudes, but miraculously doesn’t. The typography, yes, the personae also; but most likely and most simply, it’s because Bidart is an original.