Mark
Decarteret, lesser case. Nixes Mate Books. 2021. 86pp. $18.00
REVIEW BY RUTH HOBERMAN
The bio in lesser case tells us little about Mark Decarteret: only that he “has appeared next to Charles Bukowski in a lo-fi fold out, Pope John Paul II in a high-test collection of Catholic poetry, Billy Collins in an Italian fashion coffee table book, and Mary Oliver in a 3785 page pirated lit-trap.” More traditional accounts on-line note that Decarteret has been the poet laureate of Portsmouth New Hampshire (2009-2011), has worked at Water Street Books in Exeter, and is widely published—in anthologies; in journals such as AGNI, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Poetry East, and Third Coast; and in six previous collections.
But
Decarteret’s elusive “About
the Author” is revealing in its way, evoking him through juxtaposition rather
than as a biographical self. The poems
in lesser case push against any easy distillation of meaning or
authorial presence. In Decarteret’s
previous book, For Lack of a Calling, punctuation, capital letters,
and syntax operated more or less conventionally. Here, in contrast, the upper case is reserved
for “I” and Jesus, there are no periods, and the syntax is sometimes difficult
to parse—as in the book’s title: lesser
than what? should it be “lower case”? if
not, what kind of case?
The book’s first poem, “front,” while
providing no answers to these questions, invites the reader in, to a place
where
my shaking finds company
more
light has gone bad
&
yet the weary recognitions
always
happily remain
If
I take the title as continuous with the first line, the poem situates me at the
front of this book, keeping the speaker company as he shakes—whether from age,
illness, or uncertainty—a shaking that has replaced an earlier more “resolute” self:
first
we had bed creaks
&
all sorts of hunger
then
reality sat in even
more
radiant aberrations.
I
love those oxymoronic “radiant aberrations,” with their celebration of
weirdnesses and mistakes which, given the poem’s positioning, we then expect to
encounter in the poems that follow.
Indeed, the phrase “reality sat in” (not “set in” as we might expect)
hints at strangenesses to come.
One
strangeness is the poems’ relation
to the natural world. In a 2018
interview, Decarteret described the nature-poems in For Lack of a Calling
as “eco-laments” about “living in a time and place where [nature has] almost
run its course in some way.” In lesser
case he rejects the poetic praise of nature as self-serving. Take, for example,
“I have a minor in visual arts,” which ridicules his own past use of imagery:
now
those starlings I once rated
an
8 are not even worth
throwing
one’s latest voice—
that
shock of hearing one
making
a lesser case for oneself
Perhaps
the “lesser case” is their and our inevitable stance in a fallen world, where
manufacturing tropes (“what’s not to liken to anything else?” he asks) brings
us no closer to anything and leaves the poet “wobbly as a calf/licked well past
relevance.” As the speaker notes in “inhabitants,”
the poem that follows, “we won’t ever be/worthy of this house.”
When
Decarteret allows himself to indulge in descriptive language, it’s wonderful: in “some say (seed),” for example, a cardinal
comes “crashing the scrub/singing & stammering/cross-tongued” amid “branches
signing/their iciest of scripts—/a blanket of wet/& then chatter,
exaltation.” But the exaltation is dashed in the next stanza: “this response to
be cashed in—/an image in shambles again/like a berry’s taxed memory.” Decarteret undercuts easy pleasures, opting
always for the “lesser case.”
A related
strangeness is Decarteret’s
harsh stance toward his own role as poet.
In “the last ever ode to one’s pencil” the speaker lambastes himself:
even
w/the sky full of sun, unflawed
I’ll waffle or low-ball, tell you lies
go
what you’ve come to call
post-modernist
on you
try
to sell you on the same sparrow
I
saw yesterday atop the potted flowers
Like
the “berry’s taxed memory” in “some say (seed),” the sparrow has been
compromised by human greed, and the poet’s words are complicit. Indeed, with his “lab coat & paper hat,” balling
up “more poems into asterisks*,” the poet sounds downright ludicrous.
That
asterisk*, though, is a key pivot, as it sends us to an actual footnote: “please know if I’m lost on you,
stolen & sold-off-in-lots, that my line about love was about a lot more
than just votes.” Asterisk: a quasi-star that sends us toward additional
annotations and qualifications—away from, rather than toward the source of
light. Or love.
There is a
presence here that counterbalances the poet’s
“lesser case”: the subtle, complicated invocation of Christianity as a source
of transcendence. Various poem titles—missal,
host, lord god bird—invite us to think in these terms. And various poems not only suggest that
humanity on its own is a sorry thing but hint at an alternative. In “rather,” for
example, the speaker has come to hate “the
velvety kings/we’d become/thinking ourselves/all but invisible/as our hair was
combed/back in the mirror/by yet another.” Another what? Some presence we’ve preferred to ignore?
I’ll conclude with a final strangeness,
Decarteret’s poem “the kingfisher,” with its homage to Charles Olson’s 1949
poem “Kingfishers.” Critics argue over
what Olson was getting at
in his poem. Olson himself, in his 1950
essay on “projective verse” argued for a poetry that was kinetic, more
speech act than discourse, and thus resistant to paraphrase: “the conventions which logic has forced on
syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line.”
Decarteret’s poems have a similar resistance to being pinned down, a similar
pressure on the reader to follow their short lines and uncertain syntax into
self-questioning and suspense. “What
does not change/is the will to change,” Olson’s poem opens, a line equally
relevant to lesser case. But even
as Decarteret quotes Olson several times in “the kingfisher,” he does so with a
difference—shifting from several to a single kingfisher in his title, and
extending his poem beyond Olson’s final, inconclusive line, “I hunt among
stones.” Decarteret concludes:
I
hunt among stones
where
the shadows have long been
trying
to enter their side of our story
Or,
as the speaker says in “lord god bird,” “if one holds their/place long
enough/one will begin/to see the ghosts/burning their way/back into things.”
