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A Carnage in the Lovetrees
Richard Greenfield
New California Poetry Series
University of California Press ($16.95)
You’ll most quickly find the heart – the heart external,
that is – of Richard Greenfield’s debut collection
of poems, A Carnage in the Lovetrees, by cribbing vocabulary from
Donna Haraway; i.e. by examining ‘the situatedness of its
system.’ Greenfield comes to us with two ready associations:
his book shows up on New California Poetry’s roster as an
implicit term in its ongoing argument for a new poetry, but he
also comes with certain claims made on him by the putative movement
of New Brutalism. So in terms of critical reception, these two
facts will do the early mediating.
To consider first his press, Greenfield is a clever fit for New
California’s mission statement, which persists in being the
flypaper for whatever useful aesthetic debris can be sifted in
the wake of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Meaningfully, they’re a continuation
of, rather than a corrective to the “Language” innovation.
New California, in their own words, seeks “works that help
define the emerging generation of poets – books consistent
with California's commitment to the Black Mountain tradition and
reflective of California literary traditions – cosmopolitan,
experimental, open, and broad-ranging in their intellectual makeup.“ Greenfield
certainly shares in the average Language poet’s phenomenological
bent, positioning himself as the observer whose disinterest is
each moment being keened, glad if perplexed to watch “the
familiar machinery of language moving by”; but at the same
time, he seems invested in mimesis and Romanticism. As an amalgamation – the
mongrel pet of critics – he’s James Wright mixed with
Lyn Hejinian. He makes good sense as a New California poet, shading
more to the Haryette Mullen and Fanny Howe end of their spectrum
than to the Geoffrey O’Brien and Myung Mi Kim end. But he
negotiates each end, and his middle ground proves credible.
Greenfield’s other association, the more dubious of the
two, is with New Brutalism, originally a reading series that has
come to be mistaken for a movement. The movement counts among its
practitioners James Meetze, Kasey Mohammed, Noah Eli Gordon, and
Cynthia Sailers. Greenfield appears to be only obliquely attached
to this movement, and perhaps this arises from his participation
in the reading series, or perhaps from his collaboration and friendship
with Joshua Corey. However, the obliquity of this connection may
be for the best. New Brutalism presents itself as movement by fiat
alone, and, at best, a cyber-age lobby for visibility by the lumpenliterati whose addiction to blogging can cloy – if you let it.
Greenfield’s book on the level of ding an sich, however,
transcends its associations. It’s not that smart to group
him as a New Brutalist, which is pure marketing, but it’s
always wise to place a poet in a tradition, which is intertextuality
(“Because each prophet is aggregate of the other prophets,
the forthcoming song came from the ruinous literary kin”).
In this regard, he bears many of the marks of the Romantic: the
real stuff of knowledge is phenomenological, not social, except
that for Greenfield, language, which is socially-held, presents
a din from which we both make/are made and know/are known (“but
the making of my self was not distinct from the knowing of myself”);
a consequent sense of isolation (“The three stages are not
loving & not being loved, loving & not being loved (the
present case) and loving & being loved—“); and,
finally, a focus on the primacy of youth and childhood memories,
not only as the matter of poetry, but as the unchanging quantity
from which all thought is stretched.
Of course, Greenfield’s allegiance to the Romantic tradition
is outspoken: “I want the costly moon, the romantic among
the landscape, the bifurcated lineage that became catalog or compressed
lyric.” An awfully PoMo move on the poet’s behalf,
to identify his velleities of poetic habit as a prolepsis to full
disclosure of the “real world”: “Instead the
desert opens with a cynic’s raked history.” The interesting
half of his Romantic impulse turns out to be the half that desists,
the half that finds the world—phenomenological or not—failed
by the demiurge. Greenfield bankrupts the demiurge as the first
term of his poetry; any reader hoping to visualize a field of Romantic
forces sans the demiurge may randomly conjure the barren space
of his poems, the craggy desertscapes that hold impalpable cities
aloft (L.A. and Las Vegas, in this case), where the quenching blue
one expects of both water and heaven has left behind only the ambiguously-charged
word ‘blue’ (surely the most frequently occurring word
in this volume, unless it be outnumbered by ‘memory’ and
its variants). As one suspects, then, the word ‘heaven’,
too, obsesses over the demiurge that has made it a “heaven
so in love//with its own perfection, it was selfish, hovering above
the cries, above the bodies of pain.”
This is, I maintain, the point of departure for the book. The
first poem, both nominally and thematically, offers itself as map
and legend for the entire collection. “Schema” begins:
In the field of traumas come the base savannas—crosshairs
tighten
on the flaring pink of the evening.
Recognize the world. After the bit of blue, after a window opened
to air and the portioned stereo of love and grandeur, after—
The lines amount to an establishing shot, with memory yoked together
by the violent pitch of trauma, and what follows is the zoom
shot of a shattered landscape made quintessentially American
with but a few deft strokes:
Traffic flows or stops on elevated structures in denial of the seven-
point-two,
and in the aftermath of advertising, children wander the highway
in
search of litter.
Greenfield takes for his locus the depredated countryside that
demiurge hasn’t the reserves to fix. And this is where
he tunes-up the solipsism of Romanticism: the book strives to
calibrate the subjective history, the plotting of an individual
life (as in the Romantic credo, enunciated in Jeremy Taylor’s
spiritual language “We confess it in our lives”),
to social history, the history we profess in our textbooks, across
our silver screen and flickering on our TV screens. It’s
the poetic wish of a wandering boy under the sign nihil, and
ex nihilo comes: “another, liminal language through the
wall.” Comes: “Heartbreak after ha ha heartbreak.” Comes: “a
muscled romp, off-key and funereal.” While Greenfield goes
on draping sentences over the ruin, sketching what seems to have
been a terrible childhood against this desperate backdrop, he’s
recursively drawn to the redemptive factor in music. It’s
his melopoesis that will save, not the demiurge that will match
our vitiated object world to the world of eternal forms. It’s
mere music that coheres in all the clatter. Even if the music
gets divined by a drug-addled parent –- his father is played
off Judy Garland thusly: “My father, kitchened in the need
of his veins… he sleeps in amphetamine gloss” versus “Then
Garland’s contaminated song.” No matter where the
music comes from, its power is felt: “the volume shakes
my body on the floor. First there is music. Second there is music.
Third there is music.”
Whether Greenfield “will help define the emerging generation
of poets,” as New California hopes, is left to the future’s
domain. He does offer a possibility, at least. The editors at New
California seem to be selecting poets that can be arrayed on the
two poles of Language poetry, as Charles Altieri sees them represented
in Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein. Hejinian points to a possible
fusion with the Romantic, but made anew. Greenfield advances her
suggestion with a book that, while howling with loss, is blessed
with survival instinct.
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