Disfortune is that most remarkable item, a poetry collection that neither bores to tears nor drives to nausea. The back copy proudly proclaims Wenderoth's independence of "the mainstream of American poetic speech" as well as of "the well-known poetic speech-camps that have arisen on its margins." Wenderoth is not sui generis, however; his poems bear a notable resemblance both to the great lyricists of the ancient world and to their modern disciple, Jack Gilbert. Wenderoth's best lines are devoid of foolish similes and metaphors; of linguistic commonplaces that bear little enough resemblance to the actual world they allegedly depict; of self-importance. Wenderoth's is a voice I don't mind hearing. "Spring Has Again Needlessly" reads:

O the grass is neither silent nor sweet.
Spring has again needlessly
washed my whole walk
and broken nothing.
It has broken nothing, in fact,
too many times
to be spoken to.
That is, to be trusted.

There is nothing self-consciously "modern" or "post-modern" about these lines; nothing to stand between the voice of the poem and the reader's ear. The narrator, whoever he or she might be, has erased himself and his personal concerns from the work so that we can hear the poem. We hear the negation of poetic diction and cliched thought in the first sentence. In the second, we see a tired metaphor [Spring's "washing", presumably accomplished by rain] revitalized by the narrator's application of that washing even more mundanely than usual, to dishes. It is a bizarre juxtaposition--dishwashing and spring rain--that recasts the apparently anti-pastoral first impression of the poem into one apparently anti-domestic instead. Is it "spring"--as a stand-in for the world, Mother Nature, God--that the narrator has quarreled [or, actually, failed to quarrel] with, or is it a lover? An "old" theme, whichever interpretation one goes with, but approached so slyly and non-poetically, and with such a sardonic undercurrent, as to become poetically fresh.

It is a bizarre juxtaposition --dishwashing and spring rain--that recasts the apparently anti-pastoral first impression of the poem into one apparently anti-domestic instead.

Not that Wenderoth's speakers are unaware of, or immune to, the call of Romanticism. In "Learned From Billie Holiday" [sic], a mostly successful poem, the narrator begins again in a negative place--

Pleasure comes easy as pain
is familiar. I've lost interest again
in escape stories, the vague path
of narrative, its tireless
original artists.

Notice that cleverly quiet again by which the speaker tells us that, though he disdains "narrative" and "its tireless original artists," he still gets trapped by them and has periodically to refree himself. And what exactly is the tone of that second sentence? Snidely derisive? Or is the speaker genuinely praising, even while he dismisses, narrative's artists? And yet look where he ends up in this poem--back to watching the "same nameless lovers / in a bed beside huge windows." Down below

Someone is selling white flowers.
The moon is visible.
I had forgotten about the moon, flowers.
I'm not above it either, the moon and flowers.

Entrapped again in narrative and romance and--according to the first line and the title--the blues. It takes a very clever writer and thinker to so evoke age-old cliches while remaking their validity. Heine, I think, would be proud. [And what if the misspelling in the title is not a misspelling at all, but a clue to the careful reader that Wenderoth is not talking about the blues singer at all, but rather about an unknown to us woman with a similar name?]

It takes a very clever writer and thinker to so evoke age-old cliches while remaking their validity. Heine, I think, would be proud.

Disfortune contains about a dozen poems at, or very close to, this high level of skill, and another dozen that make the approach, in some lines if not in all: a marvelous achievement for a first book especially, but actually for any collection at all. Let me close this recommendation that you hurry out and buy Disfortune by quoting the final poem in full.

"Probably a Strong Undertow"

I have never seen the way
                  they have to stand.
Never seen the shapes
                  of the instruments.
Never suspected their useless colors
                  kept any secrets.
This water--this is what we say,
                  "water--"
this water is dim.
The musicians, like myself, are under
      dim.
They see less that I do,
      and seem less.
And the music comes apart and stays,
comes apart
and stays.
No one knows why it began
      to bother them, or why
they began to draw a crowd,
wading out.


Mail to Cooper Renner

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About Cooper

Cooper Renner also reviews books and engages in various critical activities for the online magazine 'elimae', under the name b. renner. He is a published poet and a very eclectic fellow.