Poetry Review: "Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851," Natasha Tretheway

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

While reading Natasha Trethewey’s 2011 poem “Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851,” one phrase in particular jumps out: “to make of the work of faith/the work of science.” The poem is ostensibly a coroner’s monologue while conducting an autopsy. The cadaver is that of a white derelict, but the doctor regards the man’s shiftlessness as a black man’s trait. He then uses his observations during the dissection to justify this prejudice. Underneath the cadaver’s white skin, everything is the same as a black man’s. The doctor’s article of bigoted faith guides his ostensibly scientific work. The conclusion determines the facts, not the other way around.

The poem's central irony is ingenious. The argument at the heart of anti-racist views is that people are the same underneath the skin; pigmentation is just a biological quirk. What matters is character. Trethewey turns that inside out. For the doctor, pigmentation is also just a biological quirk; what matters for him is character as well. In “strip[ping] from the flesh/the specious skin,” he justifies his bigotry by pointing out that this white man is the same underneath as a black man. If the fellow wasn’t, those “black” traits wouldn’t have defined him in life. For the doctor, it's only an anomaly the man's skin wasn't black.

Trethewey attacks the authority of science’s alleged objectivity through dramatizing the tendentious use of evidence to justify predetermined conclusions. She also effectively dramatizes how the most morally righteous platitudes can be skewed to justify the repugnant views the platitude is designed to challenge. It’s a pointed critique of how basic assumptions can corrupt the authority of the most idealistic language and pursuits.

The poem was originally published in the New England Review, Volume 32, Number 3 (2011). It appears as part of Natasha Trethewey’s 2012 collection Thrall (cover above). It is also featured in The Best American Poetry 2012, edited by Mark Doty and David Lehman.

Short Take: "Girl with Gerbil," Don Russ

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

Don Russ’ 2011 poem “Girl with Gerbil” has a simple conceit: there are ways a child with a pet is analogous to God. One of the comparisons is fairly benign. Like God with humanity, the girl creates the world and the stars for the animal. But the most interesting aspects of the poem are the implications raised by the emphasis given to the child’s innate narcissism. The girl “dreams herself,” and looking into the mirror, “she sees as much as says/I am that I am.” With that last bit, Russ wittily extends the child’s narcissism to God. "I am that I am" is the meaning of Yahweh, the name God gives for himself to Moses. As the poem continues, Russ invites the reader to see all God’s acts as Creator as fundamentally ones of self-absorption. The duality of tone Russ achieves through his central conceit is quite remarkable. With regard to the girl, it’s charming and rather sweet: these attitudes are steps into responsibility and towards maturity. With regard to God, they’re amusingly subversive and rather chilling. God’s perspective on Himself and His actions is no different than that of a child’s self-view? Russ flirts with blasphemy, and the underhandedness is a key part of the poem’s achievement.

“Girl with Gerbil,” by Don Russ, originally appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of The Cincinnati Review (cover above). It is featured in The Best American Poetry 2012, edited by Mark Doty and David Lehman.

Poetry Review: "Moaning Action at the Gas Pump," Brenda Hillman

This review was first published on Pol Culture.

I’ve rarely had much patience with didacticism in the arts. It doesn’t matter whether I’m sympathetic to the artist’s position or not. The earnestness of the message and the aesthetic demands of good art often seem at odds. In short, I find art is generally not a good pulpit from which to preach.

I was pleasantly surprised by Brenda Hillman’s prose poem “Moaning Action at the Gas Pump,” which is clearly a protest against our complacent societal dependence on oil. Hillman’s impetus is also clear: the devastating 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She combines a series of absurdist effects, historical allusions, and associative identifications with her message to create a devastating and artful whole.

Hillman begins on an absurdist note: “Soon it will be necessary to start a behavior of moaning outdoors when pumping gas.” It creates a bit of a shock for the reader, and keeps one reading while she elaborates. She then presents the identification that alerts the reader that the oil spill is the impetus for the moaning, and by extension, the poem. The phrase “a deep choral moan with cracks up through the body” is juxtaposed with the phrase “the crude through cracks of the sea & earth.” She shifts back to describing the processes of the human body in the moan, but the analogy between the moan and the spill is made. With remarkable economy, the former has been made into a trope for the latter.

And remarkably, Hillman’s transformation of the reader’s understanding of the term “moaning” is not done. She expands its meaning further by highlighting moaning as an outlawed political practice in ancient Greece, but she handles this very deftly. The expansion of the meaning in historical terms is introduced, and then Hillman immediately retreats to the present-tense scenario of driving and filling up one’s car. She reassures the reader that she’s not pushing too hard--“you will merely be embarrassed even if you drive a hybrid.” But this proves just a pretext for doubling down on her message: “Please be embarrassed. Please.” There’s clever footwork in this rhetorical strategy. A word that at first marks retreat is simply a pivot to a different step forward. The wordplay is quite shrewd in its pursuit of effect; it fakes the reader out before striking another way.

The artful rhetorical shifts are just as present in the second paragraph. It also begins with an absurdist note, but the note is not a mundane bit to be expanded on. It’s a wave of horrifying imagery. The most potent symbols of the oil devastation were, of course, the animals trapped and killed by it: pelicans drenched in the sludge, and manatees caught in it. Hillman asks the reader to imagine the creatures trapped inside the gas pump itself. That done, she expands the meaning of “moaning” once again. It’s the sounds of those animals in their misery. Moaning was first a trope for the spill, then one for political subversion, and now it’s one for the suffering the spill inflicted. Hillman’s agility and daring with expanding her meanings is hardly through, either. She then shifts back to the historical associations--she presents history as a series of moanings--and uses this to end on a note of ostensible helplessness. Rhetorically, though, it’s hardly a moment of surrender. It seems more meant to disturb and ultimately shock one into greater awareness and action. Hillman fakes the reader out before striking again.

What makes “Moaning Action at the Gas Pump” work is that while it is didactic, it is not a sermon. Brenda Hillman is a very canny practitioner of the art of words. She’s a keen judge of just how far she can go rhetorically at any given moment. She then uses that boundary as a springboard for a new line of attack. The reader is kept off-balance, and it’s hard not to be impressed at the wit behind her maneuvers. She’s so artful one wants to see what she’ll do next, and that keeps what she says vivid in the reader’s mind. Didacticism is often synonymous with artlessness, but in Hillman’s hands, there’s an art to it after all.

The text of “Moaning Action at the Gas Pump” appeared in the context of a writer’s roundtable featuring Hillman, Nick Flynn, Dorianne Laux, Fred Marchant, Laura Mullen, and Patricia Smith. It was published in the Winter/Spring 2011 issue of the journal Gulf Coast. The poem was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2012, edited by Mark Doty and David Lehman. (The cover image is above.)

Poetry Review: "Terminal Nostalgia," Sherman Alexie

This review was originally published on Pol Culture.

The 2011 Sherman Alexie poem "Terminal Nostalgia" is an absurdist treatment of nostalgic oneupsmanship. It does a fairly hilarious job of rendering how people’s egos can be bound up with the attachments of their younger days. It also dramatizes how they assert the objects of their enthusiasms are superior to those of others, especially others of younger generations. The overriding joke is that it’s all bluster. However, Alexie goes further than just light mockery of everyday generational pretentiousness; he also shows that it’s at the heart of overblown historical and nationalist pride.

The poem is constructed as a series of couplets containing platitudes. The opening sentence--or variations of it--is one probably known to everyone in North America, if not the entire developed world: “The music of my youth was much better/Than the music of yours...” Further down, Alexie extends this to other leisure interests, such as sports (“Every ball game was a double-header”), and reading and writing (“Back then, people wrote gorgeous letters/And read more poetry...”). The point is clear: people look back on the “good old days,” and assert that time’s superiority to things now.

Alexie cannot help but laugh at this, so he ends every couplet with the sentence, “So was [or ‘did’] the weather.” This always refers back to the couplet’s earlier statement. As such, not only is the weather of bygone days “better,” “sober,” and “liv[ing] in the moment,” it is also “money,” it “meditate[s] for days,” and “[fights] together/Against all evil...” The most hilarious example is perhaps when he writes the weather was like an Irish setter and played fetch with God before the time of Adam and Eve. The nonsensical characterizations and comparisons are comic, incisive jabs at how assertions claiming “the good old days” were better can be taken beyond the point of ridiculousness.

Alexie is Native American, and he recognizes how idealization of the “good old days” can cross the line into pathos with members of his ethnic group. Native Americans obviously have a wholly justified historical grievance with regard to the settlement of the Americas by Europeans over the last several centuries. The consequences have included the ghettoization of their communities, and much worse, outright genocide. It’s not hard to understand the sentiment that the arrival of Christopher Columbus was when everything went wrong. Building on that, it’s also not hard to understand how the pre-Columbus period could be seen as an idyllic one. This last tendency is what Alexie targets the most with the poem.

The critique of Native American idealization of pre-Columbus times operates on two tracks: explicit and implicit. The explicit critique is in keeping with the absurdist thrust of the poem, and it is frequently light-hearted. The couplets in this vein begin with the line, “Before Columbus came, eagle feathers...” What follows is amusing nonsense such as the eagle feathers marrying Indians, or giving birth to eagles, or being larger than the eagles themselves. The couplets that feature the implicit critique are far more cutting. With lines such as “Indians were neither loaners nor debtors” and “We all apprenticed to wise old mentors/And meditated for days,” they present the view that the pre-Columbus days were communal utopias without conflict or crisis. Following these bits with the refrain “So did the weather” highlights that these painfully sentimental bits of nostalgia are just as obtuse as the more frivolous ones. One might even feel the poem suggests they are more pernicious.

Alexie’s satire of nostalgia for the “good old days” shows remarkable range. It runs the gamut from lighthearted teasing to a pointed cultural critique, and it adds up to a remarkably accomplished piece. Up to now, I’ve considered him a fiction author. On the basis of “Terminal Nostalgia,” he’s also a deft, versatile, and thoughtful poet. His poetry is definitely something to look more into.

“Terminal Nostalgia” was originally published in the Spring 2011 issue of the Green Mountains Review (cover above). It was reprinted in the Best American Poetry 2012 annual, edited by Mark Doty and David Lehman.