Ocean Vuong's 'Essay on Craft': a close reading

Series introduction: From time to time on this blog I review an individual poem by a celebrated contemporary poet that I believe is overrated and explain why. Call it a guilty pleasure.

  

This poem by the celebrated Ocean Vuong is an ars poetica that stands, I feel, for many poets writing in the same idiom, one which might be described as the dominant one today--especially at Poetry Magazine and its confreres. Vuong's artistic forbears are the confessionals and the surrealists, although my contention is that he and poets like him are very much their bastard offspring. 

At its best, confessionalism stood for genuine self-interrogation, analogous to the old and today seldom-practiced psychoanalytic talk therapy. Now, in an age of pills and arbitrarily rewritten DSMs, poets too lack such self-understanding and seldom try to achieve it; what they aim at instead is unfiltered self-expression, the expression of a self that is taken for granted as authentic but is actually constructed by ascriptive identities embraced with uncritical fervour by unpteen 'gay, bi, trans, latinx, bla(c)k...etc.' poets. For such writers the line between a poem and a social media post is often blurred. 

So much for Vuong et al's confesionalism. As for their surrealism, it is little more than a box of dusty Christmas ornaments taken out year after year, a type of moribund poetic diction intended to mark their work as 'inspired' and non-traditional. It might even be taken as a defensive maneuver: If I don't even try to make sense I cannot be accused of failing to do so. The imagery is surreal in the sense that it is illogical; images are not developed into conceits that develop the subject according to some immanent logic. There is no intellectual component to such imagery such that one image could be said to 'work' while another does not. Such images are not intended to repay close reading but to frustrate it with a hackneyed claim to vatic authenticity. 

On display in what follows is the use of surrealist imagery paired with some extremely trite content that it functions to thinly obscure. I contend that nonsense and cliche are frequently found together in contemporary poetry for this very reason.   

Essay on Craft

Because the butterfly’s yellow wing

flickering in black mud

was a word

stranded by its language.

Because no one else

was coming — & I ran

out of reasons.

So I gathered fistfuls

of  ash, dark as ink,

hammered them

into marrow, into

a skull thick

enough to keep

the gentle curse

of  dreams. Yes, I aimed

for mercy — 

but came only close

as building a cage

around the heart. Shutters

over the eyes. Yes,

I gave it hands

despite knowing

that to stretch that clay slab

into five blades of light,

I would go

too far. Because I, too,

needed a place

to hold me. So I dipped

my fingers back

into the fire, pried open

the lower face

until the wound widened

into a throat,

until every leaf shook silver

with that god

-awful scream

& I was done.

& it was human.

 

In the imagery of the opening lines, 'ash' stands for loss and 'ink' for writing. Hardly original. But next, as though in compensation, comes the surrealism. Taking these 'fistfuls/ of ash, dark as ink', the poet

hammered them

into marrow, into

a skull thick

enough to keep

the gentle curse

of  dreams. Yes, I aimed

for mercy — 

 A paradox is employed here to set off the ostentatious violence of a hard-to-picture image that has already dissolved into another abstract cliche: that dreams are a 'curse' because they lead to disappointment, pictured tritely as 'a cage around the heart

 

So I dipped

my fingers back

into the fire, pried open

the lower face

until the wound widened

into a throat,

 

Another obvious image--a cliche this time not hedged with self-conscious bizzareity: The mouth the poet speaks from is a 'wound', the idea being that authentic art comes from trauma and presents that trauma as immediately as possible, without trying to make sense of it. Art is the 'spontanous overflow of powerful feelings' as Wordsworth summarised (although in fairness to the great romantic, he also called it 'emotion recollected in tranquility', suggesting that perhaps some editing, some critical thought might be in order before one rushes to publication!). Such is the naive romantic poetic that would, in the extremely stylised and degenerate form represented by Vuong, continue hegemonic down to our own day.   

until every leaf shook silver

with that god

-awful scream

& I was done.

& it was human.

The imagery continues in the same vein: a kind of primal ritual is enacted, elemental substances worked into not a representation but a presentation of the 'human'. But what does Vuong actually say about his own (or, to be merely pendantic) his speaker's humanity? That it is 'messy' would seem to be about all--just another cliche: humanity, art emotions--these things are messy, irrational, beyond definition or criticism. The poem's message is an evasion, a refusal to think about what one is saying that results in failure to move beyond the culturally enshrined cliche. The line break 'god-/awful' even suggests, gauchely enough, that the primal scream is itself a god, as indeed it surely is--the false god of Vuong's brand cut-price romantic brand. Blood, marrow and butterflies, bird cages and 'blades of light' are the objective correlate for the formulaic sturm und drang of Vuong's sensitive soul, and the hive-soul of cultural products like him. 

Review: Oyster Mountain by Jalal El-Kadali

 

El-Kadali, Jalal. Oyster Mountain. Nine-Banded Books: Charlston, WV, 2020

El-Kadali’s debut poetry collection makes a strong impression. To begin with, the cover, by talented photographer and writer New Juche, juxtaposes a marble bust with the jaws of a dying whale in an indication of the dominant surrealist mode that will be found between the book’s covers. The back cover, in lieu of any synopsis or endorsements, features a prose poem that situates the text in the current era of lockdown-mad safetyism: ‘Follow the science into the panic room whose walls are the fear of death…' There is little in the main body of the text, the the poems themselves, that speaks directly to this theme, however, or to current events in general. One of a couple of exceptions to this rule, the third in a sequence under the group title 'There Are No Statues in the Unconscious', is an absurdist narrative that evokes the Black Lives Matter phenomenon of the same year:

The statue in the strobe lighting afforded 

By flares moved slowly frame by frame

Kneeling down before the phalanx

Of riot police to offer them a dove

Like a Benin bronze but made of human clay

But did not bring one for each of them

And so in punishment for this faux pas

Despite having gone viral

She was beaten to death

Unusually, the author has seen fit to write a long-ish introduction to his own collection. This rambling text is a polemic against everything from formal verse (why?) to neo-Darwinism and, in its peremptory, madcap style, reads as if it were written by a tag-team consisting of Andre Breton and Ezra Pound. It is doubtful whether any reader's appreciation of Oyster Mountain will be enhanced by first reading these remarks, unless they happen to share Kadali's idiosyncratic enthusiasms and bugbears. 

Perhaps the most impressive poem in the collection is the first: The Lifeboat Except—a kind of phantasmagoric family history in which the speaker describes

[…] all at once shaken out

Of the alayavijnana

My father, my grandfather and I

Joining hands as brothers

 

(The alayavijnana is a kind of universal consciousness posited in the variously-named vijnanavadin, or idealist schools of Buddhism.) Thence the speaker proceeds on his strange journey past several surrealist tableaus that are rather difficult to interpret:

Pillars of sand, anthills in fact

[…] twenty feet high, topped with the shell

Of a univalve curled up for the night

 

and

 

A sign in the form of a black bird

Emerging from a hollow leaf like a spider, its beak

Auto-vampirically buried in its own breast

One wing indicating the unfolding landscape

With Caesarian grandeur, as if to say, ‘Come on and see

What else there is to see around here

 

The juxtaposition of ‘Caesarian grandeur’ with the last line and a half produces the sort of bathetic falling off that, among poets of this surrealist-cum-postmodernist stripe, one associates with John Ashbery.

Here, still in the initial poem, we see for the first and by no means last time that Kadali is not embarrassed to express the most antisocial sentiments. This, it occurs to me, is unusual in contemporary verse, where the distinction between the poet and the speaker is typically non-existent or insignificant, and the censorious primness of literary cliques has passed all bounds. Kadali may well be writing about his own dreams, fantasies and neurotic symptoms (how could he not?), but he does not go out of his way to endear his himself, or his speaker, to the reader by the usual means of presenting himself as a victim:  

 

Bury me with a full-scale mode of the world

Carved in protoplasm

And vivified by something

Like galvanism, only state-of-the-art

No two articles the same

But none admitting the least imperfection

[…]

Then put it all to the sword to serve me in the next life

 

Despite voicing such grotesque extremes of pharaonic egotism, Kadali, as an authentic surrealist, is actually more interested in the id than the ego--except insofar as the latter tries and fails to rationalise the sexual and aggressive drives within the former. The latter dynamic is with great originality exploited in 'Poison Grass', a short narrative positing telepathic thought-transference between the speaker and some kind of psychotic, mass-impaling, Hitler-quoting doppelganger:

A man-shaped figure woke me not ungently

And let me in the morning twilight to that park

Where grass had grown into bamboo

To impale the picnickers transversally

So that they were now atoning for their crimes

Though by more humane means, my guide opined

Than the vertical alternative

It is one of the stranger poems I have ever read. The only point of reference I can come up with would be the Michaux or Kafka. 

Unlike most contemporary poets, one learns very little about Kadali's social identity from his work. Is he really Arab or Persian, or is his nom de plume a whimsical but deliberate red herring, a slap in the face to those who mistake ascriptive identities for the true self, if such a thing exists, and then make accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’ against those who would dare to find multitudes within? Not that there is any orientalism in Oyster Mountain, that I can discern. 

Another striking poem in Oyster Mountain is Barbarity Blues, which seems to have been written to prove Adorno right that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’. Rather than this famous aphorism, though, the epigraph is the lesser-known statement of Adorno’s that ‘nothing is more ruinous: the scentless bouquet, the institutionalised remembrance kills what lingers by the very act of preserving it’—words the poem goes on to explicate with its bizarre and seemingly (but, I trust, not ultimately) irreverent depictions of not only the Holocaust but of many other outbreaks of barbarism:

 

And two-week old paschal calves dumped into

A flaming hole that never filled up

The third, the little one that was ‘just right’

While others were taken for experiments

And subsequently dumped in fields

[…]

Yet soon this place was utterly demolished

Except for a herm at each of its four corners

Beneath a cerulean sky

 

The humour comes from twisting an image into a conceit; forcing the ‘facts’ narrated to fit the literary typology (thus, for example, the holocaust of a cattle sacrifice is paired into a single image with the sacrifice of the paschal lamb). But could humour ever be appropriate to the subject matter, and what are we to make of this strange approach? Perhaps it is a gesture towards the unrepresentability of such matter. To attempt to represent the Holocaust reverently, appropriately or tastefully is to betray the truth by creating the illusion that we who have not lived them (and even perhaps those of us who have) can communicate their meaning. This, Kadali seems to suggest, is a greater irreverence. 

Oyster Mountain—what is it? A prehistoric shell midden? The mons veneris? A plate of Rocky Mountain oysters? Sexual subject matter and imagery abounds in this collection, often of the most surreal kind.

They walk on, and train their feet to stand

For hands, neotenous dildo hilt for head

Carved and painted with the same feet

The make the source of a woman’s weakness

The sign of her ascendency

                                           ('Perfect Cleavage')

The book’s themes, sexual, megalomaniacal and historical come together in the penultimate poem, one of three truly ambitious pieces in the collection. As best I can the tell, the synopsis of this baffling narrative is as follows:

A supernatural being modelled on Lautreamont’s Maldoror is transported to Australia as a convict for stealing a handkerchief ‘as a pretext’. Once there he seduces or rapes a girl, one ‘Emilia or Amelia / with her lace fringed parasol’ in order to impregnate her with his ‘sacred seed’. This deed reveals him to be a time traveller gone back in time in order ‘that democracy / fulfil its promise’ which he defines as ‘a sacred monarchy premised / on absolute equality’ to be enforced by his ‘followers’ known by their uniform ‘the colour of Xmas beetles’’. There then unfolds an alternative history in which the French-speaking Australians are conquered by the Japanese in World War Two, a timeline that emerges in the context of a story about a young couple on honeymoon at a former penal colony turned into a cross between the historical site at Port Arthur and some sort of theme park out of Kafka:

Here they show visitors the amputation saw

The Judas cradle crafted from huon pine

[…]

Here where Fenians with pikes were pitted against

Poachers and robbers with small arms

[…]

Then came revolutionaries, traitors to la patrie;

Here among the sandstone cottages

With rose gardens, interiors with art nouveau wallpaper

The commandant’s now a restaurant (no Lotteria

This one, but a classy joint serving whale sashimi

                                                                                                    (Sperm Donor) 

The hapless young husband ends up locked in the same solitary confinement cell from which the spirit of the narrator has emerged after untold centuries to take over the latter's life, who will perhaps in time and through suffering himself mature into a supernatural being of similar potency. 

Kadali has a way with what, in the preface, he terms 'pseudo narrative', and Sperm Donor is perhaps the most impressive example of this in the collection. The story begins in the middle--as we are told all good stories should--but then, in true avant garde style, provides no closure, no clear beginning or end.

There is much to praise in the poet's imaginative range of the poet's often thrilling imagery, full of hints at undeveloped semantic possibilities--but, as with all literature of this type, the reading experience is mixed with frustration: What exactly is he trying to say? Why this image here and not another, or not there? Does the fact that Kadali has dreamt these weird up these weird vignettes so vividly make them meaningful to others? We may feel that we 'get' something out of one poem and not another. Well, 'no accounting for taste'--but is this always true? A premise of this blog is that at least to an extent, taste can be accounted for. Once we know the end in mind we can judge the means. Does it reach the goal or not?  With a little more aesthetic discipline, many of the poems in this volume might have been great, and the best ones, insofar as I am able to judge, are those that achieve a unity of purpose and effect, a concentration uncompromised by surrealist affectation. 

Review: Caleb Caudell's The Neighbour

Caudell, Caleb. The Neighbor. Bonfire Books, Melbourne, 2021

Writing about Caleb Caudell’s first novel from my own, Australian point of view is an interesting exercise. A work of social criticism and satire as much as a tragicomedy and mock epic, social comparisons come naturally. Like Caudell's American heartlanders, we are increasingly deformed physically and spiritually by junk food, legal and illegal drugs and a consumerist culture that exists not only alongside but right on top of increasing immiseration as we lose our livelihoods, our identities and our communities.  Add to this the fact that The Neighbor is published by new Melbourne-based publisher Bonfire Books, and, in a nice visual witticism, features a photo of a truck driving on the left side of a road lined with what appear to be eucalypts—and a claim to international significance is insinuated before the book is even opened (a claim that—spoiler alert!—does not disappoint).

The novel tells the story of Jessie Clemons, a lost and listless young man somewhere in America’s heartland. His lostness invites ironic comparisons with Odysseus throughout in a way certainly less tenuous than any links drawn in Joyce’s Ulysses. One readily apparent parallel is the repeated descriptions of food and hospitality. In Clemons’s world, the food is terrible. People don’t cook; they heat things up in microwaves, save takeaway for later and eat in a decadent array of budget fast food chains serving the same range of fried foods washed down with sugary beverages.

Caudell wants us to feel the near-horror of this world, showing us not only how such dubious sustenance enters the body, but how it leaves it:

The room reeked of stale piss and trucker turds. He flicked the loose light switch and saw a mud-streaked toilet seat and soggy tissue paper trailing from the bowl onto the floor. […] Liquid plunged into unflushed liquid. His stream broke through the stagnant soup of beer, liquor, coffee, energy drinks and amphetamines. 

The scene in its totality is even more revolting. There are ‘loogies’ on the cracked mirror, even the flush button is ‘mouldy’. If there is a criticism to be made, it is that Caudell looks too hard to find the macrocosm reflected in the microcosm. But then, he has an extraordinary talent for doing just that, and for producing the kind of sustained symbolic descriptions—and, of course, structural parallels—that would put many poets to shame. 

Now on to the main premise: Jessie is on the run from a semi-accidental murder (to say more would be a spoiler). To expand on our Odyssey analogy, he starts out happily married: the young couple have each other, and this is enough for them despite their hard-working poverty. Summoned against his will to leave the idyllic Ithaca for the world of work-as-combat-with-a-hostile-world, Jessie, unlike his Greek archetype, fails to distinguish himself in battle, ending up a dishwasher while his wife languishes in front of the TV after failing to complete her hairdressing traineeship. Another dissimilarity is that the couple have no child, no son and heir for Jessie, who has nothing to pass on anyway—himself a disinherited American everyman. So how does the analogy hold up? Well, temptations—the sirens and calypsos are all the more tempting for an ordinary man. Perhaps Jessie is not so much Odysseus himself as one of his hapless retinue who eats the lotus of oblivion or is turned into a pig by Circe and needs saving by a paternal hand. One thinks back to Adorno and Horkheimer’s discussion of Odysseus tied to the mast, yielding to and at the same time resisting the sirens’ song, sacrificing himself to its mythic power while at the same time triumphing over it through instinctual renunciation—the negative sublimation that, according to Freud, lies at the basis of all cultural achievement. But what if Odysseus were not tied down? What if he were beset with all the temptations of consumer-capitalist modernity and had no powers of self-control to save himself? He had better hope the gods are on his side.      

Indeed, there are drugs, women and women on drugs who are more than willing to waylay our hero to prevent him reaching his homeland and wife in time to save them or himself. On the other side, Amber certainly has her suitors and lacks Penelope’s skill in dealing with them. Another similarity is that the story is told in non-linear fashion, via flashbacks, then and now; how he got into his current mess and how he tries to escape it. Should we decide that the Odyssey analogy holds up, then Caudell seems to be implying that a birthright has been stolen; that Jessie is on some sense a rightful king reduced to pauperism, his unborn descendants likewise slighted. As a denizen of the First World and the world’s most influential and oft-romanticised nation, it seems reasonable to read these implications into Jessie’s story. Once again, the American Dream has failed to deliver. 

So what are the social problems that Caudell highlights? Once again, the food is terrible. Jessie and everyone he knows is sick and his diet is so bad that it might even by hypothesised that this is main cause of all his problems. There is a sad irony is a young couple trying desperately to conceive while subsisting on ‘cheez whiz’ and crackers. There is not a fresh vegetable or home-cooked meal in sight. Jessie meets a series of aged kings of their own isolated little kingdoms: a truck driver who makes ‘good money’ and buys him a burger meal; a retiree working on his house in the woods and an alcoholic evangelist, both of whom come across sympathetically (indeed, almost identically, with a repetitiveness that might be questioned). Each one offers unstinted hospitality and even friendship, but the bread they break is ever in the form of a sesame seed bun. In Jessie’s world, everyone is unhealthy, an addict of one kind or another: whether of the relatively benign type of the neighbour who, in the prologue sees a pizza box crawling with cockroaches and thinks “I’ve always wanted to try that place”, or the neighbour on the other side who peddles opioids and whatever else to the scabrous masses. 

Certainly this book is on the most obvious level an indictment of fast food and prescription opioids, the latter being the real villain besides the character Ace who is their sleazy embodiment. The Neighbor is written against the social background where such drugs are America’s leading cause of premature death. The forces against which a man like Jessie must fight are hard to personify outside of the Pfizer boardroom or the US Congress; they exercise their malign power from a great height, over people ill-equipped to understand let alone resist them. This is why, to return to our Odyssey analogy, the enemies are really the hostile gods who make sport of mortals’ lives. There are momentary adversaries to face, whether it be the unsympathetic boss, the neighbourhood drug dealer or the pursuing policeman, but none of these is the true enemy, which might be a faraway elite, post-industrial capitalism, or social decadence itself.

The protagonist’s lack of forethought and motivation, his lack of character, can make him hard to sympathise with or care about, on one hand; but on the other, Caudell’s recording of Clemons’s often passively registered sensations and emotions, his mastery of subtext, make up for these shortcomings and render his protagonist compelling throughout. The life of such a character might more conventionally be told in deadpan Bukowski-esque prose—a valid if by now somewhat clichéd option. Instead, Caudell’s prose is extremely vivid, reminiscent more of Tom Wolfe than Bukowski or his epigones.       

Clemons pressed down on the gas, his body all heartbeat. Lights shone up and down the streets. He passed gas stations and diners and bars and drive through tobacco shops and liquor stores. Glowing marquees and billboards with giant faces and sculpted smiles and uncanny eyes, eerily tracking passengers passengers like haunted paintings of murdered patriarchs on castle walls. 

The use of third person narrative is masterful, conveying the dissociation and alienation that are such constant themes throughout:

Clemons grabbed the bag and went to the cooler and got a 24oz can of triple shot iced salted caramel latte, moving as if in a dream, as a composite of himself and mythical beasts and nonsensical and rootless entities, present everywhere at the same time, making decisions and movements but also watching himself from an immaterial place

Something, we feel, is wrong with Jessie Clemons right from the start, and Caudell only drops hints as to what it might be. Certainly there is no clear indication in his backstory for his lack of energy, his evident chronic depression—no formative trauma he is fleeing from. What we do note is that Jessie is not alone; in his trailer-park world of single mothers and feral children, drugs, alcoholism, bad food and underpaid, unrewarding work, his problems are systemic. He is no unique individual but a product of social forces he cannot control and has no time or energy to understand, lacking free will though not entirely without self-reflection; Jesse, indeed, can come across as a philosopher, as in his conversation with the most fully realised and compelling character in the novel, Ace the small-time druglord. 

‘I don’t believe people do wrong on purpose. They just have a funny idea of what’s right and what’s wrong.’

‘You don’t believe what you see with your own two eyes, buddy.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean look around you. You see who comes around day and night. You see what you live next to. You think we don’t know what we’re doing?’

‘I think people get confused, they forget what’s right.’

‘The trouble is, some of us are cursed with being good at bad things. What are we gonna do?’

The Dostoevskian conversation between these two characters, each in a way the other’s foil and nemesis, is for me the intellectual and moral heart of this book. Neither is right or wrong, and the question is both metaphysical and psychological: Jessie and Ace each know themselves equally well, but they represent diametrically opposed character types. The drug dealer has embraced the dark side to the full extent of his strength, becoming who he was all along, while his lost young neighbour can only remark:

‘Most people seem to know pretty early on what they’re supposed to be doing. I hear them talking about this and that dream, this and that interest, like it’s something inside of them that they can see. I look in myself and I don’t see anything. It’s just blank. There just isn’t anything there.’

In the context of our Homeric paradigm, this is very clever. The man with nothing inside him, no sustaining vision, is ‘No-man’ in a way Odysseus, who tricked the cyclops with his own clever wordplay, was not. This conceptual thread ties in with the book’s conclusion in a way that I unfortunately cannot sufficiently appreciate here without giving the latter away. 

On one level, this a precipitate of the novel’s social critique: America has nothing at its core, no steady faith, nothing to live or die for. It is a critique that extends well beyond America’s borders and all across the vista of late modernity. On another, perhaps yet more intriguing level, it is about a certain kind of person: Jessie does not see himself as an everyman; he is set apart by what he sees as a constitutional defect. He is Sartre’s pour soi in the condition of mauvaise foi, looking for an essence that precedes his existence, and not finding it. As Ace rejoins to his lament, ‘You gotta make it up sometimes’.

The two readings are complimentary and taken together help the reader to see beyond any simplistic, reactionary narrative of a nation betrayed, a mass man in need of guidance from above, a more sophisticated version of the comment made by Jessie’s other neighbour who never tires of telling people how ‘the street has gone downhill’ and how the new neighbour ‘should have been here thirty years ago’—in other words, rather unhelpfully, that he was born too late. 

Does Caudell present any hope for Jessie and the millions—perhaps billions—he represents? Again, I won’t give away the ending, but will only say that, although far from resolving all the world's problems, from a literary point of view it is highly satisfactory. 

A word about the publisher: 

In the short time that Bonfire Books has been publishing they have released a number of titles both original and vintage, across a wide range of genres. When one discovers a new publisher hawking their wares on social media one is naturally sceptical: How good is their critical judgment? How professional their production standards? Will the book be well made and the text properly proofread? In the case of Bonfire Books I can report that their standards are impeccable across all criteria. Their giving a home to Caudell’s excellent first novel is a triumph for Australian independent publishing and at once a loss and a gain to our friends across the ocean.