That’s the Burden: Late-Career Poets and Poetic “Maturity”
Rae Armantrout | Finalists | Wesleyan University Press | 2022 | 176 Pages
Carl Dennis | Earthborn | Penguin Books | 2022 | 128 Pages
Dionne Brand | Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems | Duke University Press | 2022 | 672 Pages
You’re a poet who’s been at it for a while: you’ve published ten or fifteen books over thirty or forty years, and you’ve won prizes. You’ve had critics call you an Influence. But not lately: you haven’t seen the need to overhaul your style, or your life, in any abrupt ways. You may be writing as well as you ever have, and you wonder whether the world has moved on. Most poets never get that far: some change radically, or get worse, or stop, or (like Elizabeth Bishop) publish so little that such questions never arise. But these three poets have gotten there. These books reflect on their long careers, on new topics or uses for styles they’ve kept. They also show poets reflecting on who they address, who they mean when they say “you” and “we,” who they speak for—and whether anything’s changed.
Finalists
What’s new for Rae Armantrout in Finalists is mostly her grandchildren. The twins Sasha and Renee appear, repeatedly, by name. Their adventures in pretend play and “self-talk” give Armantrout purchase on her now familiar, skeptical approach to meaning and feeling, to the falsity—or rather the fictionality—she sees everywhere: “Speech is role-playing.” [104] Signs are arbitrary even if poems pretend they are not: “It was no accident/ sight rhymed with light,// they thought.” [17] Pretending with kids is more fun, until it, too, turns sad:
“I don’t want anything,”
the child says mournfully,
when we ask her
to make a wish.
She can see we want
something,
but she can’t tell what. [169]
Whatever clarity or consistency or stability Armantrout seeks, it’s not what the world can provide: “If that’s my mind,/ I don’t want it!” [161] But Sasha and Renee treat themselves less harshly: one of the twins “names what she’s doing/ as she does it.// She swaddles herself/ in the soothing gauze/ of words.” [155]
Finalists is a book about kids and language, but it’s also a book that holds “facts about the pandemic,” [140] one whose long-lasting calls for response echo especially hard from the months of lockdown: “Please call/ and make my phone ring;// it's lost and you too/ are missing.” [149] “The hope is that,” like tendrils in “fungal/ mycelium,” we “exchange messages” so that “we’re not alone.” [134] (Fungal mycelium!) Twins, of course, may never be alone, which may delight or exasperate their caregivers: “Do you really love the same/ inflatable black cat?... Who loved it first?” [119] If “everything blue belongs to Sasha/ while everything purple belongs to Renee,” “what to do in the case of lavender?” [30]
Because Armantrout has so thoroughly taken into herself the arbitrariness of signs, the dubiety of consumer desire, the flimsy constructedness of what we call “the self,” love for an inflatable black cat seems exactly as questionable as love for Mozart, or for the Earth. Maybe we shouldn’t love anything, or anyone. Or maybe we should take more seriously a preschooler’s love for inflatable cats, and for the sounds of names, which implicate us, willy-nilly, in the gendered injustice of all social life:
Soon you had added
an “ie” or an “a”
or even an “ette”
to your names
because you knew
identity is complicated. [48]
There are two sections, or “books,” in this book (one called “Finalists,” the other called “Threat Response”), and sometimes it feels like there are two Armantrouts too. One pursues, just as she has for decades, a wonderfully spiky left-wing skepticism about capital and discourse and patriarchy and “plastic” (an important word for her). [50] Another one just chases beauty: “as if swallowtails/ batted summer away.” [69] “Blank scraps--// day moths--// still sail/ on the updrafts.” [121] But really there can be only one Armantrout, and she’s all here. The suspicion, each short line potentially undermining the next, around which Armantrout built her style remains, but at this point in her life she can “remember/ to intend/ to hold it/ tenderly.” [23]
Armantrout’s title also suggests a poet who has reached retirement age: “I am ready,” she writes, “to be displaced.” [36] There’s not much medical information here, but earlier books alluded to treatment for cancer; earlier still, to her mother’s death. (Nor is there much of the outdoors: having spent most of her life in California, where she reacted to the dry, sunlight, built-up environs of San Diego, she and her family now live in Washington state.) It’s a suspicious book, like all her books. And it’s a worried book—who isn’t worried, now?—in which similarities and metaphors open out onto the depredations of capital, spraying its poisons over our one round world:
The Cheerios
in the babies’ cups
are full of Roundup.
“Circle,”
one girl chirps. [21]
It’s also a book that looks closely at Armantrout herself, and at her loyal readers (she has many; she could use more), and at the fun her grandchildren have. The play of its language, for all its scare quotes and its caution tape, invokes
How a child’s excitement
over all new things
is meaning
hovering jerkily above
a word, not settling. [76]
Never settle, the poem says: not into single fixed meanings, not into any way of writing less strange, less ornery, less exciting, than the one that Armantrout has long made.
Earthborn
Nobody thinks Carl Dennis’s poems extraordinarily exciting, but some of us consider them beautiful, trustworthy, and wise. If poets like Armantrout fracture and press hard on language, Dennis extends it, smooths it out, makes—in his reasonable, multiply-subordinated, pentameter-based sentences—fine analogs for the amicable, melancholy, civil compromises he recommends. Earthborn is his fourteenth collection (Finalists is Armantrout’s eighteenth), and at this point Dennis’s readers in general know what we’re getting, in the same way that birds, in general, know trees: “the birds, knowing the trees will always/ Give them a stable home, feel free to indulge/ Their flightiness.” [100]
Up close each tree may show something new. I showed Earthborn to two friends this week. Aphra (a pseudonym) called it “cringe.” Bettina (another pseudonym) sat down and read every page rapturously. In a sense they were both right, since Dennis wants to exalt, to make central, the very attitudes and values—cooperation, humility, patience—that tend to make radical novelty-cravers and witty ironists cringe.
That said, I’m with Bettina. Dennis, incredibly, asks “whether I need more humility/ Now that my planet is in serious jeopardy.” [95] He’s the one poet alive who has all the humility he needs. The critic Rachel Greenwald Smith wrote a good book about “compromise aesthetics”: she’s against them, but she’s even more solidly against atomistic, no-such-thing-as-society neoliberalism, and there she and Dennis—and Dennis’s style—agree. If we can’t “be kind,” Dennis says—if we can’t behave as “members of an ensemble,” accept half a loaf, move step by step towards former enemies—we can’t do much good for others at all. That’s how politics works, at least for him (and for Joe Biden, if you like). It’s also how to live, and how (for example) to learn the violin: “It may not be a cure for loneliness,/ Devoting your idle hours to learning to play one,/ But it’s a step in the right direction.” [82]
There are poems here that no one else could have written: poems whose conceits alone stick in the mind. One two-pager thanks an editor for a fifty-year-old personalized rejection. [77] Another poem envisions “a congregation of urban planners,” like the stonecarvers who helped to build Chartres Cathedral, “passing the task along/ To those who are waiting to move it forward,/ Glad that the project has no end.” [68] Such poems might really do what Dennis says belief in reincarnation might also do: “lead to the practice of tolerance,” or “prompt you to be more patient with a friend.” [59] What they lack in crisp strange images (fungal mycelium, for example) they make up in conversational eddies and flows, and what they lack in flash they make up in, well, lack of flash. What may be his best, most pointed new poem proposes a new American, or perhaps un-American, holiday, “Dependence Day.” This “holiday in early spring… honors dependence in all its varieties,” extending to cows—“It’s your milk, we’re glad to proclaim/ That’s provided the slices of cheese for the sandwiches/ In the lunch boxes of the farmers’ children”—and then taking in people whom the state labors to exclude:
families
Camped on the Rio Grande, longing to cross
Into our country and begin again.
It’s obvious how they depend on us.
But today let’s focus on our dependence on them,
How only through them can we be the people
We want to become, the fabled welcomes
Of the huddled and homeless, ever loyal
To the hopeful republic that once proved willing,
Though we brought few assets
We could identify, to let us in. [47]
If only. The poem implies that even Dennis’s mild, accommodating vision of society might prove too tough for we selfish Americans to achieve. But a writer can dream. Dennis writes, as he knows, out of relative comfort, “gratified by the use of the word we,” [39] grateful for a postal service that delivers letters to his door. He even reflects, at a “broken stoplight,” “on all I owe the lights when they’re working.” [22]
Usually it is people who have lived through chaos and violence that remind the rest of us not to take stoplights for granted. Dennis—who spent his childhood in St. Louis, his adult life as a university teacher in Buffalo—emphasizes his own relative safety, his privilege, the attributes that make it seem almost easy for him to keep his style this calm, his pentameters this fluid. He seems to feel gratitude as a matter of temperament, not even “taking the sun’s return for granted.” [7] Such reminders could feel almost bitter in earlier poems, but now they feel as genuine as the admonition that concludes the first poem in the book:
Let me see
What I’m ready to see now
When I set aside the notion that more is coming,
More reserved for some other day. [3]
The postal service, and the sunrise, and the stoplight, and the belated thank-you note, really ought to be enough; one poet at least has learned to live this way.
Nomenclature
For Dionne Brand they could never be enough. She has spent much of her forty-plus year literary career imagining, and advocating, versions of Black, and feminist, and Third World-led transformation, even revolution. What’s more, she has worked to make them happen. During the early 1980s Brand moved from Canada to Grenada to work alongside the leftist government of Maurice Bishop, forming friendships with Bishop, his wife Jacqueline, and others in the ruling New Jewel Movement before their assassinations in October 1983 and the US-led invasion that followed. It’s no good to reduce any talented poet’s work to their life, but it’s hard not to read into much of Brand’s later poetry her reaction to a revolution overturned, and to the broader retrenchment that faced so much of the North American left as the 1970s became the 1980s, the 1990s, and then the Bidens and the Trudeaus of today. A bad day in the 2020s “feels like a day in 1983// a headache, a sound like planes.” [36] A better day reminds her of “that time we were ibises, and we flew// red feet across three continents.” [35] Red as in revolution; red as in flags.
Few Canadian poets get more attention in Canada, where Brand is also known for prose fiction, social research, essays, criticism, and film. And yet Nomenclature, a thick new-and-selected, appears to be the first United States book publication for Brand’s verse (Duke brought out The Blue Clerk, a book-length hybrid prose-poem, in 2018; if you’re a C. D. Wright fan, check this one out too). Brand has worked for radical social change for decades, and she’s understandably, vividly tired, “waiting to throw my limbs on the pile,” as she says in Ossuaries (2010). [539] Her best late poems—and there are many—track her inward, variable, complicated desires, but they also record her wish to present a brave face to the outside world, lest she let down her side. “It was difficult to live and love at the same time,” she recalls, “since to live is to be rapacious as claws”; [524] “our sleep is ideological”; “all the cities are violent with time.” [33]
Brand’s sense of book, page, poem, unitensures that she never imitates Adrienne Rich directly: Brand works in lengthy, open-ended sequences, and in epigrammatic fragments, as against Rich’s short series, sharp closures, and stand-alone poems. That said, Brand can feel and sound like Rich’s heir, as well as the heir to the Afro-Caribbean traditions in which critics have tended to place her, and to the literally revolutionary orientations she invokes: “it is not enough to change the bourgeois state,/ this sentence slumbered in her, sleek,/ you have to bring it down.” [519]
Late Armantrout shows a skeptic whose left politics place her far from any crowd. Late Dennis shows someone whose moderate hopes may not have changed much, and—if they collapsed in 2017—may even have revived. Late Brand—by which I mean the first and last parts of this massive book, Ossuaries and Nomenclature for the Time Being (2022)—follows a poet who set her expectations high as a matter of necessity. So much had to change, had to happen, to make a just world! And so many of those changes did not happen, despite her best efforts: she wants to scream, has wanted to scream for a long time. “Even if she goes outside the cracks in her throat will break.” [355]
Nomenclature includes Brand’s 1984 volume explicitly about Grenada, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun. In it “dream is dead in these Antilles,” “Maurice is dead, Jackie is dead,” “some of us sold each other.” [192] Brand recalls days “hemmed in by sieges and military occupations,” [185] her work of solidarity crushed and burned out. That work echoes her poems against racial and social injustice in Canada. “I’ve handed out leaflets at subway stations,” she remembers, “crying death to the murdering policemen.” [141] She invokes, by name and by imitation, the poets of New World and Third World revolutions: Guyana’s Martin Carter, Nicaragua’s Ernesto Cardenal, Pablo Neruda, and—inevitably—Bertolt Brecht. But none of these poets grew old in Canada: none saw this century begin.
The older Brand has, and she has become a poet of what the critic Sara Marcus analyzes (in her new monography) as “political disappointment,” reflecting on what to do and how to organize after so much has gone sour. That’s the burden of the long sequence “Nomenclature for the Time Being,” along with a blast against centrist hypocrisies:
the politicians assured us they had hearts and that their hearts
were aching for us. This reminded us of the paper cut-out hearts from kindergarten.
Between the kneeling and the cut-out paper
hearts we suspected these people could not help us. We saw that
They could kill us. [53]
“We”: Brand will not separate herself from the most vulnerable people who may, or may not, be reading her poems. At best, her inward, emotion-charged writing can feel like proof of concept: she, and people like her, can survive. “We/ breathed water when there was no air, we grew gills and fins.” [42] “I don’t know how I did it but I’m here.” [44] (The whole collection takes the name Nomenclature; “Nomenclature for the Time Being” names her set of new poems, no relation to W. H. Auden’s For the Time Being.) Brand looks out over cold Torontonian roofs as she looks back over her allies and her life:
The house tops were our horizon, not counting all the evenings
every day is lived in crisis, wasn’t it always so
and we in all these coats, we look like past lives of our selves
as if we are looking at photos a century ago
and we were dressed in all the horrors, sanguine of our possibilities
and we, with all our knives with all our honeysuckle looks…
I have my heart to take care of
if heart is what it is, if heavy is its leaf weight [38-39]
The single heart weighs almost nothing, and everything: multiplied by a hundred, or a billion, it is what Brand has been fighting for.
The fight continues, and it is a fight against white supremacy, against what people like me have been taught to call normal, against the conventions for which Dennis gives thanks. (If Brand sounds uneven or unpolished at times, that may be just what she wants.) “Nomenclature for the Time Being” might be Brand’s best sequence, as well as her latest, because its twelve-line, not-quite-sonnet units feel so consistently like claims she cannot help but make, proved on her pulse. One of those units deserves reprinting in full:
I refuse to reproduce whiteness
the innocuous procedures of good morning
and good evening, good night’s malign debenture
the lien and mortgage in how are you today
oh so sorry, look out, oh dear
let alone the bailiff emergency
What time is it
we tried everything
not to kill you, we even tried not living
nothing worked
we even tried living our own lives, nothing
worked [33]
The precedent here is Frantz Fanon, for whom colonial and racial injustice can only be driven away through some violence, literal or metaphorical. If we don’t feel that need for violence, that’s because we don’t know what Brand has learned: “What is it to talk as if the world you know is the world?” [13] She’s asking herself, but also asking me: who are you? Who are we? When Dennis says “we” he means people like me, more or less (and he’s white, and I’m white). When Armantrout says “we” the word comes in scare quotes. But when Brand says “we” she means either Afro-diasporic people or other groups of people who need urgent change:
we read their books, as I said earlier, took
in their alphabets like popsicles and lesion paste
it’s a good thing that they don’t know who we are [8]
I may not be able to take part ably in Brand’s struggle, nor to take up her methods, any more than I could write like her (or like Armantrout, or like Dennis). But I want readers of poetry, even in the United States, to know who she is, and to think about who we leave out, and about who we are, and—with Dennis the political liberal, and with Armantrout the grandparent—about who we and our descendants might someday be.