The End of the Rainbow

Over the weekend, we had a lovely experience. 

We live in the East Bay Hills, facing the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge to the West. 

At sunrise, I awoke and looked out the bedroom window, and to my amazement saw a vertical rainbow touching down on the Bay, directly behind Brooks Island, a narrow body of land sitting just south of Richmond/Marina Bay. I rushed downstairs to get our old digital camera, and caught just the tail end of the display before it faded into the dawn light.    

Rainbows are unusual enough here, but catching one from a point of view that allows a useful photo is rare indeed. 

There may not be a pot of gold along the Tiburon shoreline, but it was inspiring to see nature's accidental fireworks from our own backyard. 

The 2016 Presidential election is coming to an end, and it's clear that Donald Trump, while not winning the actual popular vote, has been elected to the office.

The prognosticators have been telling us all along that Trump's campaign strategy, which has been consistent from the beginning, was appealing to what Nixon supporters used to understand as the "silent majority"--the part of America often referred to as the ideological Middle.

Political sentiment has always been as much about emotion and irrational projections as it is about facts and realities. Politicians who can tap into resentment and frustration can often overcome better candidates who base their campaigns on valid points. 

While some of Trump's talking points were superficially valid--stemming illegal immigration, restoring jobs--there never was any reason to believe he had any concrete solutions.

Trump has behaved as a demagogue, strutting and blustering and wise-cracking. He is a man without political experience, or public speaking skill, and with little knowledge about domestic or world affairs and issues. 

When America elected George W. Bush, I felt deep embarrassment for my country. How could a naive, smarmy little truant rich boy ascend to the highest office? It became clear, eventually, that Dubya was nothing but a puppet, that the real President was Dick Cheney, who guided our country into dead-end foreign wars, while using the patriotic fervor generated by those conflicts to engineer a traditional conservative domestic agenda (tax breaks for the rich). 

I've always said that Americans are dumb, and that who we elect to political office is the clearest proof of that. Trump's election is further evidence.

For three generations, America has been losing jobs, and its standard of living has declined in real terms. Meanwhile, corporate America has flourished. The political parties' answer to this has been to champion minorities and immigrants, "free trade," tax breaks for rich and corporations, etc. 

Rather than addressing the root causes for the widespread frustration which these trends have created, the Democrats have talked about "inclusion" and "cooperation" and brotherhood. Code words aimed at minorities, whom it was widely believed represented the new "swing" vote strategy. 

Again, the fact that Trump might never be able to "deliver" on any of his vaunted promises (building a wall, bringing jobs home, increasing domestic security), had nothing to do with his appeal. 

Because casting votes is more about gesture and sending a message, than it is about seeking real solutions. In this current election, supporters identified with Trump's adolescent posturing and resentment at outsiders. 

Politics is indeed dirty business, and Trump's strategy has been to play it as dirty as possible. It wasn't that his supporters were duped, as much as that they got the message they were looking for.

We live in a democracy, which means that no one side can win all the time, or at least that's what the rules say. Yesterday, Americans spoke. You can like it or despise it, but they expressed their sentiment, directly. 

They're fed up with how things have been going. Will we listen to them? Or are they just the great unwashed benighted fools we've been thinking they were all along? The unemployed auto and steel and glass and textile and rubber and plastics industries workers have been hurting, and they feel betrayed by a government which puts their priorities at the bottom. They haven't enjoyed being told that the needs of Mexicans and Syrians and Indians come first, while they must learn to be more "tolerant" and transform themselves into service drones. 

Now, with majorities in both houses of Congress, and a "can do" guy in the White House, whatever Lola wants, Lola will get. 

It's likely that Trump's administration will be "business as usual" for the rich and privileged. The American Middle Class will continue to crumble.

Plus ça change . . . . 

The End of the World

John Martin [1789-1854] was an English Romantic painter. Very popular in his day, he specialized in apocalyptic scenes such as these (below), which showed an Old Testament feeling about mankind, God, the universe, and the vicissitudes of existence. 

Most of Martin's big turbulent canvases I've looked at feature a familiar theme--a great fiery cauldron into which earth and mankind are either being swallowed up or threatened with impending incineration. This is represented either as "God's wrath" or the work of a pitiless infernal influence, the inevitable consequence of humanity's sinfulness--visions of mass destruction and the end of the world. 

The 19th Century was dominated by what are now described as "Scriptural Geologists"--scientists or theorists who tried to reconcile the universal concepts of Christianity with the new science of geology. They hadn't yet begun to understand vulcanism and plate tectonics, so they were basically free to imagine that the devastating eruption from Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD was a phenomenon generated by a supreme deity. Pompeii was guilty of decadent and conspicuous indulgence, and ripe for punishment. 

Religion has often used fear and loathing to scare its adherents into obedience and conformity. And the Victorian Era trembled under the apprehension of an angry deity.       

In Martin's colorful vision The Great Day of His Wrath, we see humanity and cities and whole sections of the earth's crust blasted up and tilting into the crucible of melting matter. 

We now know that vulcanism is a clear expression of the instability of the planet, where molten elements periodically leak upward through the earth's crust, through cracks in the seams of the huge tectonic plates, which migrate slowly, in geologic time, round the unstable surface. We know these eruptions occur naturally, through the process of continuous formation and deformation of the hot matter beneath. But Victorians--who had no real understanding of larger geological forces, or of the vast spectrum of time involved-- were free to speculate about imaginary causes and meanings.

The popularity of Martin's holocaust-like pictures is a testament to the fascination people had with frightening nightmares of their own jeopardy. It was fun to look at pictures like this. Today, people still have intense curiosity about large, terrifying events, such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornados, though we no longer see them as manifestations of destiny or the will of the gods. There's no one to blame for these things, so we have to treat them for the periodic and inevitable occurrences they really are.       

John Martin The Great Day of His Wrath 1851-3

(To see these images better, drag them onto your desktop, and expand them onto the screen.)

The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum [1822]

John Martin [1839]

Today, however, we've come to the realization that our affect on the earth's weather has become nearly catastrophic. As global warming progresses, the seas rise, and drought covers vast areas of the land masses of continents and islands, we'll be faced with the consequences of our own mischief in offending the chemical balances of the atmosphere, resulting in catastrophic changes in weather, the seas, and the ice-caps. As if garden-variety pollution hadn't done enough damage, now we're looking at a compromised planet, much less hospitable to all life, than we had come to imagine it just a century or so ago.

In a very real sense, the moral imprecations of the 19th Century are being revisited upon humanity today, though we have only ourselves to blame, not an angry god. It isn't, after all, our profane indulgence in sex or crime or persecution which is the fault, but our presumptions and negligence about the natural world at large. The earth, which once seemed so large and unconquerable and inexhaustible in extent and largesse, we now know is vulnerable in its fragility and finite limit(s). We've offended Mother Nature, and she's unlikely to take the offense lightly. 

Written not long after the end of World War I, Archibald MacLeish's famous poem The End of the World presents a piquant, ironic and surreal take on the fatalistic crisis of consciousness familiar to poets and novelists of the time (1920's).      

           The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly to top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all. 

Just in case you were wondering, Vasserot is probably a made-up name, though Ferdinand Vasserot was a French bicyclist who competed in the 1900 Summer Olympics. The poem seems to describe a circus, inside a big circus tent, in which various figures are performing feats and tricks. Vasserot the armless ambidextrian, Ralph the Lion, Madame Sossman, Teeny, Jocko are figures in a madcap troupe and the "thousands of white faces" are the audience. Quite unexpectedly, the top of the tent blows off--something that might actually happen--revealing the big dark night sky overhead. The "vast wings" might be less literal. The "sudden blackness" might be said to represent the "nothingness" of the universe, or the meaninglessness of existence, the larger context of infinite space, beyond mankind's imaginative powers. 

MacLeish responds to the new cynicism of the Lost Generation with a half-serious comic salvo. Though he is usually included with Eliot and Pound among the high modernists, his career took him away from aesthetic disengagement. He had a career in law, which he gave up to write. Returning to America,  he worked as a journalist for Fortune magazine. Later, he served as the first de-facto American poet laureate (called then the Head Librarian of Congress), and still later inside the precursor of the CIA during WWII. He also became a successful playwright. 

MacLeish presents the case of a figure torn between tendencies. Sympathetic to Communism during the 1930's, he worked as a propagandist during the Second WW to promote the cause of victory. Stylistically, he's now regarded as an imitator--particularly of Eliot--and his poetry has not stood the test of time. He may have thought of himself as an innovator, but that seems less and less so today. 

His poem is notable for its fragmented phrases, and the sense of coy surprise, but the repetitions seem more hackneyed ("there, there overhead, there, there" "blackness . . . the black pall" "nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all") than inspired. It's almost like nursery rhyme. It's a novelty, which perhaps suits the clever cunning of its method. Read for the first time, it leaves an indelible impression, which palls with each successive reading. This is a quality which he shares with E.E. Cummings, of a specious playful inventiveness that is short on conviction. It usually comes off as gesture. 

The poem is sufficient unto itself, and demands nothing more of us but mild amusement, though it purports to carry a much larger message. In the context of his whole work, it often happens that an inferior poem or composition comes to occupy a much larger place than it deserves, and overshadows more ambitious and laudable efforts. Novelty pieces like this can actually hurt a writer's reputation.           

Archibald MacLeish [1892-1982]

Prow of the Viking

Who knows whether one of my distant ancestors, originating in Norway, ever sailed in one of these boats--to England, Greenland, Russia, or perhaps even the Northeast corner of the North American continent in the days before Columbus? Who knows whether they drank some kind of home-brew? Akvavit or aquavit has been produced there since the 15th Century, but I'd bet they were tossing back something equally strong long before that. One of the marks of civilization is the invention of alcoholic beverages, which are believed to have existed as early as six thousand years ago.  Various fermented mixes of grape, grain, herbs and honey have been consumed in various parts of the world for a very long time. 

This concoction, which features aquavit, reminds me a little of the North Sea, bracing with sea air and a slight chill, though this may just be my vagrant imagination at work. By itself, aquavit may have a slightly sour/nutty taste, which is moderated by the gin, in this case a specific kind, produced locally by the St. George firm--a bit dryer, and spicier than usual. Lime juice tightens it up further, and the odd combination of violet flower, peach and cherry may resemble the kind of flavor combination favored by some of the ancients. Since they couldn't have had a way of measuring the alcoholic content, except by judging its effects on their bodies, approximating its actual strength wouldn't have been possible. For my purposes, weighing and measuring the flavor factors is much easier than it would have been for them.  

Skol!  


2 parts St. George "Terroir" gin
2 part aquavit
1 part fresh lime juice
1/2 part peach liqueur
1/2 part creme de violette
1/2 part maraschino liqueur

This combination makes two cocktails, shaken and served up in frosted glasses. 

The Giants went 57-33 before the All Star break. They've gone 23-39 since. 

It's consternating to realize that if they'd only managed to play .500 ball, or 31-31 in the 62 games since the break, they'd be two games ahead of the Dodgers today, at 88-69. Instead, they're six games back at 80-72, with 10 games to play. They don't have a prayer of catching the Dodgers.

How did this happen? Were the injuries to Hunter Pence, Matt Duffy, Joe Panik, Sergio Romo, Matt Cain and Gregor Blanco the reason? Actually, no. Statistically, they played better without these key figures, than they have WITH them! 

Was it the pitching that fell apart? Or was it their anemic hitting? Can a team that hits fewer than 140 home runs, and drives in fewer than 675 runs, win a pennant? This year, the Cubs, who have run away with their division (they're currently 97-55), have 189 homers and 718 RBI's, and could finish with over 200 homers and 760 runs by the end of the year. 

The Giants' strategy of fielding good pitching and weak hitting offenses may have caught up with them this year. 

The team has shown problems in all key areas. Relief pitching, power hitting, situational defense, even managing. Bochy's notion of showing faith in players who are underperforming, or in long slumps, has backfired repeatedly. 

Trading Duffy for Moore was probably not a bad idea, though Moore is not a top-flight starter, despite his one near no-hitter in Los Angeles on August 26th, and he might end up elsewhere in 2017. 

Casilla's days as the closer here are almost certainly numbered. With nine blown saves--enough to sink any contending team's chances--he's thoroughly demoralized a team desperately in need of relief support in close games. 

For my money, the season's over. Even if the Giants were to qualify as a wild card, their chances of competing against the Cubs, or the Nationals, appear nil. 

It's been a wild ride this year. First half champions, second half dismal. Which is the real Giants? Has any single player reached his potential this year?

Maybe Johnny Cueto, who is 17-5, but may get only one more start this year. 

Otherwise, not a single player is having a "career year" or even close. The Giants don't have a single player this year who could qualify as a true star. Posey and Crawford and Cueto are having good, not great seasons.  

Imagine what this would have looked like had Posey and Belt and Panik and Crawford and Pagan and Span and Nunez and Samardjiza and Casilla had really good years. We would likely have run away with the prizes, even without decent power. 

For next season, some things will change. Pagan and Nunez are probably gone. Ditto with Cain, Peavy. Casilla too. Panik and Hunter Strickland don't look secure. 

We'll still have a solid starting rotation. But we need a reliable closer, someone who can come in and shut the door for one inning. Someone who can get 40 saves, with an ERA of 2.20 or less, who relishes the challenge.

Bye-bye 2016. The even-numbered year wasn't a charm this time around.

Wait until next year. 

You heard it here.  

Still More Variations from the Stainless Steel Counter

In the constantly shifting round-robin of ingredients, inevitably there will be some duplication. How many permutations are possible today, given the number of different kinds of spirits, liqueuers, flavored additives, etc., which one can find on the market? 

Lately, there's been an explosion of taste enhancers, known traditionally as "bitters"--which is to say, a combination of alcoholic base, to which is added (mostly natural) flavor agents, such as various herbs and spices. Just a few years ago, about the only kinds of these products one could find were Angostura Bitters, Peychaud Bitters, and the occasional Orange Bitters. Today, there are dozens of different mixes and brands. Some of these flavors can be created using easily available spirits or "aperitifs" while others can be quite exotic. The bitters craze is partly a renewed interest in the past, when such additives were more common; but it also may be a harbinger of a new more baroque epoch in alcoholic beverages. Variety is the spice of . . . or variety is spice itself. Flavor variation. Subtlety of expression. Difference. Diversity!

Recreations of traditional recipes share billing with new concoctions by bartenders trying to generate curiosity and sales, or by retailers looking to expand their product base. This is all good, assuming you don't object to alcoholic beverages on principle. I didn't become interested in cocktails until I was well into my fifties, but I wouldn't want it thought that I was encouraging young guys in their twenties to start drinking hard early in life. Consumption of alcoholic beverages isn't an art, or a profession, but designing them can be a diverting pastime. I've never thought I wanted to be a bartender, but I respect those who take up the profession seriously, and do their best to provide decent product, unadulterated and genuine. 

In any case, here are three new concoctions from the stainless steel counter, not filched from any book or online source, invented out of my own wayward imagination. Cheers!  


Key Lime Liqueur is a specialty which I suspect few mixologists use, given its particular cream base, which tends to overshadow other ingredients. Nevertheless, I find it very cooperative in conjunction with allied flavors, such as the St. Germaine (with its elderflower base). 

4 parts gin
1 part Key Lime Liqueur
1 part fresh lime juice
3/4 part St. Germaine liqueur
(shaken with served up)


This one is a take on the aquavit-apple constellation of flavor, and it seems to work very well. The fernet branca (or amaro) is counter-intuitive, as flavors can sometimes be. 

3 parts aged aquavit
2 parts apple liqueur
1/3 part fernet branca
1/3 part simple syrup
1 part sweet lime
(shaken and served up)


Here too the kirsch and St. Germaine are not familiar companions in mixed drinks I've seen, but they seem happily conversant. 

2 parts terroir St. George gin
2 part Italian dry vermouth
1 part kirsch
1/2 part St. Germaine liqueur
maraschino cherry
(shaken and served up)

Massey's Second Collection

William Carlos Williams famously declared "no ideas but in things"--by which he meant that poetry should be constructed out of references to actual objects, events, people. This was a reaction to the cloud of abstractions which poets often employed to make traditional verse. Williams believed that the material world constituted truth, a foundation upon which to make a literature of relevance to life as it is really lived. 

Of course, Williams didn't always follow his own dictum. Most of his poems--even those most "material" in their substance--are in fact a means to achieving a certain abstraction--a feeling, or a conviction, or a thought. Things as things is only a beginning, not an end in itself.

George Starbuck, who headed the University of Iowa's Poetry Workshop when I attended it in the early 1970's, sarcastically reframed the Williams motto as "no ideas but the in thing." Starbuck was officially a poet opposed to Williams's American Language program, free verse, humble themes and down home subject matter. But he acknowledged the value of material data, and incorporated it in his own highly structured poems. 

Williams wasn't alone in advocating a foundation of real things in literature. Leftist thought places emphasis upon the importance of acknowledging real conditions, the "material reality" of existence, "scientific" knowledge, empirical verifications, etc. The Objectivists, of whom Williams was a card-carrying member, believed, as Zukofsky summarized, in "sincerity and objectification" in poetry. Which is to say, that objectified reality, perceived honestly, portrayed accurately, employed with a commitment to truth (sincerity), was the goal. The Objectivist message was shoved aside by the Second World War, and the McCarthy Era's paranoia. But it resurfaced in the 1960's, and has had its share of adherents over the decades. 

One of its most avid followers is the young poet Joseph Massey, about whom I wrote previously here in Minimalism Part VII - Joseph Massey & the Collateral Tradition, on August 25th, 2010. The irony for me is that I endorse Zukofsky's dictum, and have tried to follow it myself in the poetry I've written over the last quarter century. I fully accept the notion that you begin with facts, and things, and aspire to achieve a synthesis of objective reality and higher purpose, instead of beginning with ideas and looking for evidence to support them. 

A poetry which relies on observation and description risks becoming mired in the physical detritus, in the same way a religious poet, say, becomes tangled up in the conundra of divinity. I've always preferred to read about the imaginative qualities of actual things, which confirm, to a lesser or greater degree, my own confidence and pleasure in appreciating the world of my senses. Any poetry which evokes the sights and sounds and tastes and scents and touch, effectively, will always seem more vivid and tactile and satisfying to me, than a poetry which doesn't. Which would suggest, on its face, that I would be drawn to the poetry of a poet, like Massey, whose poems live in that realm. 

Unfortunately, however, I'm put off by Massey's poems, for reasons that I'll try to make clear here, not because I bear Mr. Massey any enmity, but as an objective case to demonstrate what I think can go wrong with the Williams/Zukofsky injunction, when misapplied or misapprehended, or slavishly followed without care.  

Mr. Massey lives up on the Northwest Coast of California, south of Eureka. It's rainy, foggy country, the kind of place conducive to quiet meditation and morose moods. The first thing to note about him is that he spends a good deal of time, apparently, watching the weather, and idly studying piles of trash, beach detritus, weedy edges, birdshit, dogshit, garbage, litter, rubble, driftwood, rust, dirt, etc. Certainly, you can't complain about a poet's choice of subject matter, since the challenge in making art is in turning this kind of stuff into meaning. Cormac McCarthy wrote a whole novel, Suttree, about the intricate life of a river-bum, enmeshed in the squalor and degradation of every kind of filth imaginable. Suttree is a wonderful book, and by the end of it (if you make it that far), you know you've been in the hands of a master. So if a poet like Massey chooses to think about junk and garbage, that's his privilege as an artist. The first question to raise in that case is: Are we raised above the level of a curious five-year old who wanders through the waste, enchanted by the exotic items, the casual variety of cast-off materials? 

As a boy, I spent most of my time focused on the ground in front of me. I was fascinated by rocks, and all the things people and animals leave on the ground. Money, keys, small toys, keepsakes, rabbit feet, seeds, bits of glass and fibre and paper and metal. I probably was some kind of archeologist of the mundane as a child. But it wouldn't have occurred to me then, that a taxonomy or catalogue of my findings would ever constitute the stuff of artistic expression. Massey, for reasons that are not clear, seems to have determined to devote himself to the minute exploration of the deposits and rubble which he finds in his environment, and recording his thoughts and feelings through the registration. 

At the Point [Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011; 91pp.] is Massey's second full collection of poems. It's fully consistent with his first [Areas of Fog, 2009], and confirms the preoccupations and tendencies of his debut volume. 

Bench

Cut grass, gasoline,
mound of rotted
weeds in a vacant lot

--the scent cast,
dense, with
each breeze--in

flustered shade.
What's in a day's
name: its slowly

summoned rhythms
looped through
the music-

less field--after-
noon's clamor:
huddled

cars, deflated
bass lines
at a red light,

an argument 
rattling the blue
aluminum trailer.   


This is typical of Massey's work. Narrow lines, brief stanzas. Line-breaks, dashes and hyphenations split the process of our reading up into segmented apprehensions, as if this were a method designed to delay and control the progression of discovery, as in an incremental revelation of content. I have trouble with poets who seem to believe that line-breaks and word-breaks are evidence of some kind of wit, or as if breaking up phrases and sentences somehow made more sense than simply writing it out as prose. And make no mistake, Massey is no syntactic experimenter; his poems use regular grammar and punctuation, there are no made-up words, and abstraction is held at bay with a determined focus on image and immediate object. These images and objects are linked, but usually with a verbal violence that is many times more intense than the occasion might demand. My assumption is that Massey thinks that this intensifies the effect of the emotion, and makes a stronger poem. Constructions--such as "flustered shade" or "huddled cars" or "rattled . . . trailer"--would suggest that the poet wants us to read more into inert matter than is there, and that his doing this increases our appreciation of his ingenious sensibility. 

The Process

Cross-stitched
outside sounds
double the day's

indoor confusion.
How to untwine
noise, to see.

There's the bay,
highway slashed
beneath; water

a weaker shade
of gray than this
momentary sky's

widening bruise.
The page turns
on the table, bare

despite all
I thought was
written there.


I have a number of problems with poetry like this. First, I have trouble reading it as plain sense. What does "cross-stitched outside sounds" actually mean, and how do these sounds "double the day's . . . confusion"? There's a straining after effect with the highway "slashed." A landscape might be "slashed" to make way for a road, or the sound of traffic on a freeway might sound like "flash" or "shushing"; but "slashed beneath" is not only literally inaccurate, it's a pretentious attempt at dramatic description, which doesn't convince. Or, the "sky's widening bruise" which I suspect is an attempt to describe an overcast color or occluding cloud front. But bruises are usually pink, or red, or brown, only occasionally grey or dull blue, which I suspect is the tint being evoked. The conclusion is a weak attempt at irony. If the speaker was actually writing this poem in a notebook, the words would be written on the page on the table. Why we should be either surprised or moved by their blankness is not explained. In the end, we are more apt to regard the poet's "confusion" in line four as the poem's essential, though unintended, message. The overall effect of a descriptive sequence such as this is that the writer is a watcher, recording detail and event, and attempting to draw philosophical or meditative conclusions. But the crudity and exaggeration and inexpressive means fail to accomplish this. 

The Lack Of

i.

Sunset's requisite sparrows
clamor in the shrubbery.
How the room falls, falls

further into formlessness,
around itself,
and memory--

cast to the moon's
glassed transmissions. 


What are "requisite sparrows"? Is "clamor" the right verb to describe the sound birds make in a bush? In what sense is the room "falling" and where is it falling to? How is "memory cast" to the moon? What are "glassed transmissions"? Since Massey is such a stickler for material reality, exactly what kinds of impressions, or direct observations are these? My guess is that "requisite" is an attempt to inject a trite irony into the initial setting. "Clamor" wants to be more emphatic than another, more accurate descriptive for the bird flutter. The room "falling into formlessness" is an attempt to . . . what?. . . describe someone fainting, or nodding off? Isn't "glassed transmissions" just a naive way of saying the moon is seen through a window? What other poetic qualities are summoned by "glassed"?

The use of overkill language is rife in Massey's verse. The "highway" is "slashed"; "shadows carve the room"; words are "plunged into hunger"; "haze blots"; "light" is "gashed"; "nasturtiums lurch"; "leaves" are "lathed"; "hedges dredged"; "halved by haze";  "ocean's drone drones"; "things throb"; "clouds" are "warped"and so on. There are, too, a number of whoppers strewn about on the pile: "spring singes the sky's organized incisions." Ooh, that one stings! "Traffic's sustained sibilance grows louder later." "Through the bone of a stutter." "Gibbous moon splinters." "Wind pinched." "Where the jetty juts." "Moss-cleaved crags absorb." "Stone reflecting stone." "Knocks the walls into sleep." "This severed gestation." "Thorax throws off." "An echo gathering more and more silence." The more I read of Massey's work, the more convinced I become that he's futilely trying to reach for statements and effects that he seems unable to achieve. He mistakes hyperbole and oxymoron and malapropism for poetic successes, apparently believing that this makes his work vivid and immediate and pungent. A construction such as "hedges dredged" looks like a pathetic attempt at onomatopoeia, but the actual effect is a tinny clank. Hedges bear no useful relation to dredging, so though their shared sounds intersect, forcing them together is not a happy convergence. It's simply a mistake. 

Mr. Massey wants his poems to sound as if they have conviction, and this frequently leads him into dead-end structures. 

The hills
aligned

with clouds
aligned

with the 
windowsill

levitate.  


The view of hills and clouds through a window does in no sense suggest that they, or the speaker, or the viewer (reader) are in any sense "levitating." What is supposed to be rising? The clouds? The window-sill? The poet? Or does the simple iteration of the "Return" bar signal the rising of the earlier stanzas?  

In the work of George Oppen, or John Taggart, or Ronald Johnson, say, description succeeds both because the means report or interpret reality validly--that is to say, accurately--and the thought is profound enough to give us pause. Joe Massey seems a nice enough fellow--though his character seems more obscured than revealed in his poetry--but he's neither profound nor sensitive enough to write interesting poems. There are references to excessive drinking here, which I suspect is no accident. The overall impression is one of bored silences, of aimless drifting along streets or seaside outlines. The poems show effort, but not the delight we feel in happy combinations of sense, sound and phenomena. Massey has a tinny ear. He thinks "a dream's drowsy disassembly" is a "poetic expression," a struggling towards articulation. But it's just a stupid alliteration that summons amusement, not confirmation. 

This book is dedicated "to Humboldt County" where Massey lives. California has been the dramatic inspiration for a number of good writers. Robinson Jeffers along the Big Sur Coast. Gary Snyder in the Sierra Mountains and along the seashore. John Steinbeck. Robert Hass. Yvor Winters. Our forests and mountains and plains and rivers and rocky coast-lines have inspired a lot of interesting writing. We are still creating a regional literature that will stand for generations to come. I wish I could say that Massey's work is likely to rise to that level,  but I can't. If he hasn't read his Thoreau and Emerson and Dickinson and Whitman, he needs to start. If he hasn't read Pound and Stevens and Williams and Zukofsky, he needs to do so, and soon. Because if he continues along the path he's chosen, he will end up like Cid Corman, conjuring pathetic flash-card haikus.