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| Martha Rhodes |
The Thin Wall Martha Rhodes.
University of Pittsburg Press 53 pages. ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6453-7.
REVIEW BY ED MEEK
Nicholas Kristof, the liberal columnist
for the
New York Times, ran a poetry contest recently asking
for poems about President Trump. He then printed the
winners.
Here is one he chose: “If God has
made men in his image/Please explain our new President’s visage.”
The poem continues with the rest of the limerick. Apparently clever,
rhymed limericks is what Mr. Kristof thinks of as good poetry and Mr.
Kristof is a well-educated person.
In a recent article in
The Atlantic,
a well-meaning English teacher
laments the
fact that he doesn’t teach poetry in his classes; he would like to
if only he had time. I taught high school for a number of years and I
was surprised to learn that few of my colleagues taught poetry in
their classes. They confessed they didn’t understand the poetry in
The New Yorker and didn’t know what made poetry good
anymore. Instead they read novels and memoirs and drama in their
classes and on their own.
I bring this up to point out that
poetry today is kind of a mess. There isn’t much agreement on what
poetry is. Instead there are many different types of poetry or
schools of poetry, created by universities and academics and beyond
those schools, there is poetry outside the academy and beyond that,
there is poetry that is popular with readers and fans. There is also
rap, and spoken word. There are sites like “
Hello
Poetry” where people post poetry that is shared. “I love poetry/
an easy way to express/ my innermost thoughts.” Then there are
rhymed religious poems read by funeral directors and poems written by
best men at weddings. That is, there is an immense range, and quite
a divide between what the public thinks of as good poetry and what
the academy considers good poetry. The latest trend of blackout or
erasure poetry is, on the one hand kind of interesting, on the other,
a sign of creative bankruptcy.
In the last twenty years MFA Programs
have
surged and multiplied (hundreds of
programs and thousands of yearly grads) and have become more
academic. In fact, many writers who get MFAs now go on to get PhDs.
In any case, academics, when they can, aim to control and define the
arts. This happened with fiction back in the 1970s and 80s, but by
the 90s, the public got fed up with all those post-modern
pseudo-intellectual novels full of narrators talking about the novel
and novels with multiple endings or with no endings at all and
fiction returned to what it does best: telling stories that are
well-written because those are the stories that sell and get made
into movies.
Unfortunately, poetry doesn’t sell
and doesn’t get made into movies. Poetry is more like painting and
sculpture except it doesn’t look so good on your wall or in le
jardin. But since there are so many MFA Programs, publishers
figured out that they could sell books of poems to all those MFA
grads. At the same time publishing and printing have evolved so that
publishers can print on demand and no longer have to invest in a few
thousand copies of a book before putting it on sale so that it is
much easier now to get a book published by a small, independent press
or even to publish it yourself. The result is that we have thousands
of books flooding the market. Yet there are few critics of poetry who
have been able to define the poetry of our age. In fact, for the most
part, no one even criticizes poetry. Instead, people just write
positive reviews of poetry that they like. This creates an odd
situation where there are a number of poets who write prose that is
merely broken into lines. And there are poets whose poetry really is
aimed at an academic audience. The T.S. Eliot’s of our day.
Martha Rhodes is a prominent figure in
the landscape of contemporary poetry. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence
and in the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College; she is the Director
of Four Way Books in New York. Her new book, The Thin Wall,
has been published by Pittsburg Press. It is a slim volume of 53
pages divided into three sections, each with a number of poems,
usually one to a page, with no titles. The sections are: (Burden of
Inheritance), (Yard Fire), and (Looking Down). Those section titles
are in parentheses. Why are they in parentheses? It seems a bit
self-conscious, doesn’t it? Here is the first poem:
There are apples,
buckets of
and heads wet from the dunking.
A witch ‘round every corner.
Ladders.
Jury and judge.
A pond of bodies bobbing, condemned.
And nineteen nooses wait.
That seven-gabled house.
Girls run the streets accusing
the accused. In Salem Village,
Goody Proctor bears her child in jail.
Our party pays to tour the next grey
house.
This is the most successful poem in the
first section. This is our inheritance here in New England: the
witchcraft and the hangings. Throw them in the pond to see if they
float and if they do, they must be witches! The narrator sees this in
her mind as she is on a tour. There’s wit in the last line—that
we should pay to see this past of ours. And the self-conscious use of
language shows up again. Why “buckets of” as a separate line
rather than: There are buckets of apples. The off-rhyme with judge is
there either way. Why isn’t it titled “That seven-gabled house”
rather than insinuating that line in the middle of the poem awkwardly
just to set up the last line?
Other poems in the first section are
not so resonant. One poem begins: “The air was heavy with blood.
/The boys washed off in the Merrimack.” That’s a little too heavy
handed. So too another poem that begins: “Both of us under one boy
or another./That’s how we spent our senior year.” That sounds
like the beginning of a Chelsea Manning confession in Vogue. I
don’t actually believe that anyone spent her senior year under one
boy or another. Here’s how another poem begins: “Boys, girls,
some of them siblings,/spawning in bathtubs all over town./ Drown
them?” It sounds like The Beans of Egypt Maine where kids
crawled under the porches and no one knew to whom they belonged.
There’s a kind of condescension at work here, assuming personas
that do not ring true.
The second section is called (Yard
Fire). It is about relationships. The first poem is about loss:
A crow at my mouth.
The bread from me
it stole. I felt
like a flour sack,
pecked, consumed,
scattered. Enough dust
to dust. You, just gone.
That certainly captures the feeling of
devastation when someone dies—the hour of lead, Emily Dickenson
called it. Of course Emily’s poems were written before God died.
Now there is no recourse. Nice sequence at the end of the poem with
all that assonance.
The last section is called (Looking
Down). In a couple of poems the narrator is in fact looking down at
another or another’s body. There’s humor in this section. One
poem begins: “Your dog’s dinner. /What you feed the chickens.
/The mud at the bottom of the Charles. /I’m what washes up on the
Merrimack’s shore.” The poet is personifying all that’s
rejected and cast off. “I’m everyone’s former friend. /I’m
his former wife.”
In the final poem
of the book, the title comes up: “Nothing is the thin wall of glass
(as thin as skin)/ just over there…nothing grabs us all, good or
bad, boy/girl popular, un-,
you…” So, when you read that,
you might agree, Yes! It really does. Or you might not. Apparently,
the publishers at Pittsburg Press think, Yes! “Nothing” separates
and gets to us all. But can the word “nothing” when used as the
subject of a sentence have agency? “Something there is that doesn’t
love a wall…” Frost said and maybe Rhodes is playing off the
Frost line.
There’s clearly an aesthetic and a
worldview at work in these poems and if you identify with her
sensibility, you will enjoy them. Martha Rhodes is widely published
and, by just about any measure, quite successful as a poet. The fact
that University of Pittsburg Press and a number of highly respected
magazines publish her work is testimony to a particular type of
poetry, “furious and viral,” Susan Wheeler calls it although I
don’t know where these poems would ever go viral. There’s a
psychic distance between the poet and her subjects that undermines
her authenticity. Rick Barot says, “demanding as they are
beautiful.” Beauty, and the appreciation of it, seems pretty rare
in this collection.
In
a recent interview in The
Paris Review, Ben
Lerner talks about a problem he sees as endemic to poetry.
The
main demand associated with lyric poetry is that an individual poet
can or must produce both a song that’s irreducibly individual—it’s
the expression of their specific humanity, because it’s this
intense, internal experience—and that is also shareable by
everyone, because it can be intelligible to all social persons, so it
can unite a community in its difference. And that demand… is
impossible.
Of
course it is not impossible. It is difficult, particularly today in
our fragmented world. Whitman said, “to have great poets, there
must be great audiences.”
We seem to be in a
transition period for poetry. Here’s hoping that the recent
popularity of writing, reading and performing poetry leads to a
better sense of what good poetry is and what it is good for. Literary
magazines call for poetry that pushes the boundaries; we would be
better off with poetry that makes connections with tradition but
reflects our age. Too much of what appears in our literary magazines
today works too hard to break with traditional poetry and results in
either not being poetry at all or in being self-conscious and awkward
under the auspices of the experimental. Maybe a few great poets will
create great audiences.
