I admire Dennis Lee for entirely different reasons. Like Carson, Lee has worked in a wide variety of fields. To date, he has composed sixteen children’s books, edited five anthologies, and written music for various children’s television programs, including the theme song of the 1980s show, Fraggle Rock. Of note, he also co-wrote the story for Labyrinth, the 1986 film directed by Jim Henson and starring David Bowie. Riffs is his seventh poetry collection for adults, of thirteen. Being a midcareer work, and an evolutionary one in Lee’s poetic trajectory, it plays a different role in the Brick Books series than Carson’s Short Talks. His work couldn’t be described as a-generic or hybridized in the way that Carson’s can, but that’s very much to Lee’s strength: the poems in Riffs are exuberant, slippery, erotic and celebratory in a way that only verse proper could accommodate. They are funny, too, though they don’t contain the same wry, self-ironic sensibility that characterizes Short Talks. There’s an honesty and fluidity to them that remains rare in contemporary poetry today. They seem to spring, if not from the heart, from an artless, emotive impulsivity. I imagine they were scribbled down, at least originally, without much hesitation or editing. That’s not at all to suggest that Riffs feels unfinished or even rough around the edges—quite the contrary. Lee’s Riffs contains a genuine spontaneity that I admire and even envy.
Lee’s penchant for spontaneity is evident even in the opening passages, where the tone is especially celebratory: “Yup, this is how it happens: / you do your half-smile, serious and bantering both, / and right on cue my insides / cave in” (Riff #5). Though the tone grows sullen later in the text, the same spontaneity remains, altered by Lee’s pained emotional tenor. It’s as if readers themselves experience the ups and downs of the speaker’s romantic relationship. That spontaneity is enhanced by Lee’s typography, which ranges from largely standardized free verse to highly enjambed and radically indented lines that, as they unfold on the page, mime not only the fluctuations in the speaker’s voice but those of romantic relationships, and life, more generally:
Fact: it was
wrong from the start.
Our treks through plenary
skin and vistas, the
blastoff to lovers’ clear—
those were
snotty renditions of soulful.
Furtive. Self-serving. A lie.
Riffs’ spontaneity is something of a break from Lee’s earlier poems. As Paul Vermeersch notes in his introduction, 1968’s Civil Elegies features much more rigidly structured and tonally congruent poems, pieces that match the gravitas of the collection’s title. Consider the stanzaic structure of Elegy #5, which Vermeersch somewhat paradoxically—though I think correctly—describes as both “fluid” and “stentorian”:
It would be better maybe if we could stop loving the children
and their delicate brawls, pelting the square in tandem, deking
from cover to cover in raucous celebration and they are never
winded, bemusing us with the rites of our own
gone childhood; if they only stopped
mattering, the children, it might be possible, now
while the square lies stunned by noon.
The poem’s long lines and stressed, syllabic clusters place it in immediate contrast with Riffs, but we see some of the same stylistic moves: Lee’s taste for polysyllabic abstractions (“raucous celebration,” “bemusing us with the rites of our own”) paired only lines later with palpable monosyllables (“the square lies stunned by noon”) remains constant. Tone and structure similarly complement each other in Riffs, though they function in largely different ways. As Lee permits increasing amounts of white space, the poems themselves open into a playful, erotic mode simply inaccessible to the speaker of Civil Elegies—perhaps why this particular collection has aged so well. Ultimately, Riffs veers from celebration to frustration to, if not contentment, optimism, as the speaker begins to accept loss, acknowledging the transience of love and of life itself:
The dolphins of need be-
lie their shining traces.
Arcs in the air.They do not mean to last. One
upward furrow, bright & the long disappearanceas though by silver fiat of the sea.
(Riff #88)
Despite their aesthetic differences, Carson and Lee embody a distinct period in North American poetry, one that finds itself in the wake of postmodernity wherein poets must push the boundaries even further in order to renovate the genre. In Riffs and Short Talks, we observe the poets challenging what a poem can do and say, how it can act on the page, and how readers in turn relate to it. In a cultural moment when critics decried the genre’s irrelevance, the period’s aestheticians—of which Carson and Lee remain exemplars—began to experiment not in the mere categorization but in the very ontology of the poem. Poetry broadly, and these poets specifically, answered this charge by innovating subject matter, the line, tone, and even by defying the genre’s conventions altogether—at points by writing, not poems exactly, but poem-like verbal assortments that licensed the poet with a greater window of invention. Such could perhaps be said of other periods—we think of Eliot, Pound, and the Modernists in this way—but never had a poetics migrated so radically from its point of origin and still, for the most part, been called a poem, even if sometimes it was called so by imposition. In fact, the innovations readers note in Short Talks and Riffs foreground many current poetic movements, from the n-th generation New York School to the subgenre known as ecopoetics. Yes, Brick Books’ release prompts us to (re)investigate these collections’ historical moment, but that moment was already all around us. It’s simply up to us to recognize it and observe.
[1] It’s worth noting that The Autobiography of Red is classified on the book jacket as “poetry/fiction”; Red Doc>, on the other hand, is classified only as “poetry.” Both are published by Vintage. To what extent has her work’s reception shaped its categorization?
