Who’s Cooking Beautifully: Formalism and Younger Poets
Armen Davoudian | The Palace of Forty Pillars | Tin House Books | March 2024 | 88 Pages
Maya Jewell Zeller | out takes/ glove box | New American Press | November 2023 | 92 Pages
Back in 1960, Robert Lowell punned on anthropological terms to divide American poetry into the raw and the cooked: poets, such as William Carlos Williams, who sought the impression of spontaneity (on the one hand) and poets (on the other) who revel in plans and forms. You could, if you like, make the same distinction today, though you’d have to allow for the prominent elders (Patricia Smith, say) whose work falls in between, speech-like, brisk, but in fixed forms. You’d also end up noticing how many of today’s “cooked” poets choose structures that seem new, or avant-gardish, or recently popularized: lipograms, abecedarians, Golden Shovels, cascades of irregular and internal rhyme, erasures (so many erasures). And that’s fine. It’s modernist cuisine. Sometimes, though—being a Poetry Critic™—I get asked who’s cooking beautifully, right now, with traditional recipes, using forms that Tennyson might recognize. In 2023 I would have named poets my age, or older, or poets at work outside the U.S. Or both.
Today I’d name Armen Davoudian. His first full-length book, The Palace of Forty Pillars, shows for the first time in far too long what meters and rhymes and inherited forms, used deftly and clearly to speak of real lives, can do. Those forms serve Davoudian not as ends but as means, where his end goal involves opening up a full—and emotionally vulnerable, and strikingly international, and very gay—life. Davoudian’s ethnic Armenian Persian family moved, apparently during his childhood, to America from Iran. He uses that international displacement to bolster the craft in his verse: Davoudian told The Rumpus recently that this “lifeline to Persian helps me maintain perspective on…helpful but limiting ideals of American poetry: the imperative to subvert and surprise, the insistence on sounding “natural,” and the suspicion of artifice.”
Just so. His models include James Merrill, and Merrill’s friend Agha Shahid Ali, and he matches their taste for flagrant puns and taste-defying rhymes: “Where have you tasted the green unsmiling mullah?/ I’ll be the first one to dig up the moolah!” “And then a rock dove, astonished midair, dove/ from its own ghost that stamped upon the pane/ in dovetailed detail, a short-lived afterlife.” This unfortunate bird, fleeing its mirrored image, matches the immigrant who duplicates himself on a new continent, and also matches the work of translation, where “all is dual.” The title sequence, a truncated crown of sonnets, addresses his grandfather: “Isfahan/ nesfe jahan, you’d boast, lifting a glass./ If you’ve seen Isfahan then you’ve seen half/ the world. I’ll see you in the other half.”
This young poet never stops saying goodbye (a.k.a. “I’ll see you”). He also keeps on saying hello: to new words, to new and unglamorous landscapes, to newly-acquired learning, and to new desires, as in this stanza, set “in my all-boys school”:
When the others leave I meet with a friend to study.
Behind the stacks, he unbuttons his uniform
and then lies down. Leaning over his body
like Ali Baba over the thieves’ treasure,
I copy out the answers on his chest
with what I know even then is too much pleasure.
Of course a poet focused on the Middle East, and enchanted with Shahid Ali, writes ghazals, and good ones. As that form demands, Davoudian’s lines collect allusions without insisting on singular plots:
You were the wife of Lot. I was the salt of your body.
Though I’m not a believer, my hand was in yours.
“Who speaks of the Armenians?” Let our gravestones crumble
so they can uncover my hand was in yours.
Adolf Hitler asked “Who speaks of the Armenians?” in a 1939 speech preparing Germans for the invasion of Poland: Nazis, of course, also tried to kill off us queers. Personal and collective, ethnic and amorous memories, vertical and horizontal identities, blend in Davoudian’s Biblically informed lines.
Davoudian can get quieter than his models, as if to let other voices in, though if they fall silent he’ll stand up and speak. Even the calmest of Davoudian’s pages offers some verbal felicity, some colorful polished gem, secreted from Persia or fabricated in L.A. “Something There Is That Doesn’t Love” skips in irregular trimeters from German-language camp in Vermont to Robert Frost’s New Hampshire to Trump’s America, then ends with the punch of a rhyme:
The president believes
good fences make good neighbors.
The roads remain divided.
Undercuts are in.
Something that doesn’t love
burns on the streets again.
Usually in Davoudian two things happen simultaneously: one personal, literary, rarefied, and the other public and catastrophic. The Trumpism in that poem, or in “Travel Ban,” makes one example. Another comes at the end of “Passage,” where first responders “are wrapping children in Mylar/ and putting them to sleep/ where they used to house ammo./ A mother shouts, te amo.” Bilingual plays on words abound, as do borrowings from rarer forms: an echo poem on the model of George Herbert; a Merrillesque mini-crown, or ring, entitled “The Ring,” full of palindromes and anagrams and word golf: “No poet can…EDIT the TIDE of TIME.”
All those flourishes speak, as Davoudian has said, to older traditions than what American English offers. They defend beauty as an end in itself, a resistance to the bulldozers of fundamentalism, and capital, and practical use. And they praise, more simply, erotic love. “Persian Poetry,” atypically, uses free verse lines that break on the phrase, and it begins with distance from academia: “I teach Robert Lowell to undergraduates at an elite institution./ My colleagues study poverty and race,/ the conspiracy of language,” “positionality,” “wordplay cheap and without tact.” F*ck that, the poem says, or better yet, f*ck me. Right now, in any position:
Your knuckles are furred like my father’s,
balling his socks one inside the other
and tossing them on the bed
for my mother to collect later.
I believe in nothing more than in love.
I write poetry in English
because I grew up speaking Persian.
The problem with Lowell’s raw vs. cooked divide, of course, is that a good “cooked” poem—like that one—has to incorporate some sort of “raw” emotion, just as a good “raw” poem, re-read, reveals what feels like a form. Maya Jewell Zeller’s second book, out takes/ glove box, does exactly that: it’s part cri de coeur, part prophetic dictation, and it reveals logic, structures, and plans aplenty—on rereading. Its terse surfaces crack open or crumble, asking us to see the psyche they carry: “unpeel me like a sticker/ from this page/ of my life,” she implores, “like an unfixed wife,” or a taken-apart salvage car: “O flip this car over/ O see the fireweed growing/ through the floor boards.”
Fascinated by animals and bodies, Zeller’s work finds a precedent in Plath and another in Brigit Pegeen Kelly as it careens across her Midwest:
my mother, my used
little ovaries, this dark box
the roads I drove…
In the field
where I have arrived,
I close the horse
We opened together.
I close its flayed stomach.
out takes/ glove box’s collections of visions drive, and are driven by, notions of gender, attempts to find power through body parts that most women have: “our barbed little vaginas/ oh dangerous as hell” remind Zeller of “what you find under/ the hood of a car,” “a herd of horses car// this horse a mare/ we stared down in a field.”
When she is not an anatomy lesson or a staring mare Zeller becomes a mermaid, albeit a mermaid, or a mermaid’s mother, with a “a baby, half human,/ half fish, like a winged// girl with a question-mark/ body, soft as sky.” It’s not easy being, or keeping, this baby:
How does a mermaid
arrive on a mainland?
How does a mother
keep her alive?
To be a mother, to be seen as a mother—as Dorothy Dinnerstein observed in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976)—is to be seen as mythic, mysterious, at once less than and more than human: “What I mean to say,” Zeller concludes, uncomfortable, confident—“is/ being a mother made me feel/ like a myth. What I mean is/ I’m a fish. What I mean/ to say is don’t open me.”
Mothers’ ambivalent, supercharged, passionate relationships to our children do not—as they did for Wright, or for, say, Laura Kasischke—turn into whole stories about how real children grow up: Zeller neither creates nor incorporates narratives. Instead she gives us symbols, moments, scraps and portraits and animals and quotations: “the six-year-old said she missed/ being in the womb, where no one bothered her.” [36] Cows and horses in Iowa give the first half of Zeller’s book their animal aspects, grisly, close, warm; the second half introduces not just mermaids but fairy tales and talking trees.
The immigrant in Davoudian’s crowns of sonnets and ghazals moves from real place to real place. The mother-poet in Zeller is not even human, if she can manage it: “If this is what it meant/ to feel human, I wanted nothing of it.” Living in a “place with more rock/ than water,” she portrays herself as the kind of mermaid who would rather return to the sea:
At night I lie with my feet
on my pillow so I can imagine it is a wave
and the moon is a ship or a cave or the full
eye of the squid, its inky sail behind it
like a prisoner.
“Prisoner”: the trisyllable arrives like wind in a ship’s wake. When Zeller pursues recognizable structures—structures with roots somewhere other than her own unconscious—she takes them not from the European past but from modern nonliterary genres. “Story Problems” for math students, for example (“The square root of whiskey is water”). Instruction manuals: “Eat the corn of your corrugated porch… Dance the day into Iowa. Have you been here before?” Spells: “Spell for Highly Capable Children/ & Newborn Giraffes/ & Gaffes.” Like C. D. Wright, she makes poems out of details, close-ups, “outtakes” from other poems, making protagonists out of supernumeraries from earlier in her book.
out takes/ glove box’s tight turns, changing one metaphor for another, and sometimes all-too-laconic stanzas (especially early in the book), show a poet trying to settle into a real life in a real body (perhaps with real kids, or a real mother, in a real Iowa) and finding myths instead. Fortunately Zeller knows how to share those dreams, those visions, those myths, those fairy tales: “Spend time in children’s books,” she requests in “Spell for Extroversion,” proferring “a kitten and her moon, her bowl of moon milk./ A toad, his button jacket, a bird.” But the bird needs his mother. Uh-oh; “I am the notion of a mother. Instead/ I want this notion of a bird to take this notion/ of my hair I’ve cast out beyond the grapes.” Not “out of my hair”: just “of my hair,” passed over like sour grapes.
Zeller takes epigraphs from recent poets with similar subjects and not-so-far-from-hers treatments: Robin Ekiss, Rachel Contreni Flynn, the UK’s Amy Key. It’s a risk, inviting comparisons. Zeller withstands them, not just because she’s strange and laconic and passionate and sonically varied (not, for her, the One Brand of Free Verse Used Twenty Times) but because, for all her night terrors and familiar cornfields, she’s fun, and in unfamiliar ways. “When I was a tree I aspirated daily/ it wasn’t even dangerous/ & this is a supple climbing branch/ aka a magic portal/ this is how I got on the float/ I pretty much aced the application…& when I was the wind I was terrible.”
Notice the whimsy here and the puns on botanical meanings (leaves literally “aspirate,” though they have no human aspirations): notice the puns on “float,” and “application,” and “terrible.” A terrible beauty, in this first volume, is born, with special attention, or application, to mothers and other people who give birth. That beauty joins others in recent English-language poets (Ekiss, Key, Kasischke, Rachel Zucker) who investigate visions and nursery stories and fleshly feelings and dreams: Zeller’s gifts place her in warm, if frightening company.
Davoudian—by comparison, within his generation—stands almost alone: not alone in using old forms but alone in how well he uses them, in what he does with them, in how far back into history he seems to see. And that makes sense. People in 2024 who believe that old forms make poets politically conservative need to get out more. But people who see old forms—cooked forms, with time-tested recipes—as historically imbricated, as never brand-new, have a point: ballades and crowns or rings of sonnets and ghazals and rhymed quatrains come from, and point back to, previous eras, to what we call civilization. They work for poets who want to change that civilization, to adjust it, to live with it and within it (as, to be honest, I do too). If you want to try to live on the outside—in a figurative outdoors, in recovered innocence, in a wild state, out on a climbed limb—you may have no choice but to figure out how to stay raw, how to make poems that feel, not polished and wise, but wildly naive and new.