I’ve had a Selected Poems of the German poet Hans Magnus
Enzensberger on my shelf for years and I finally read it over the summer. In my
Vintage anthology I really liked “For the Grave of a Peace-Loving Man,” “Song
for Those Who Know,” and “The Poison.” This time around, however, the “bare bones” style wasn’t connecting with me at
this point in my life. So much of how we respond to poetry seems to have to do
with where we are in our lives and our intellectual pursuits of the moment. Like
tastes in music, it’s ultimately subjective and beyond rational.
But I do see many checkmarks in this book. My favorite poem
was “Notice of Loss,” a cascading list of possible losses, ending with,
I’ll be through in a moment,
your lost causes, all sense of shame,
everything, blow by blow,
alas, even the thread of your story,
your drivers license, your soul.
I also rediscovered Alice Fulton from an old copy of
Palladium that I had. For some reason, I now enjoyed the more lush vocabulary
she provided. In college, a teacher recommended I read “Dance Script with
Electric Ballerina” which I found impenetrable at that age and
eventually gave the book away. On my shelf I also have Powers of Congress which I
haven’t yet finished. At first Palladium felt jerky and disjointed but as I
went along I realized I just had to get used to her particular train of thought. I loved
her pretty intellectualisms, her variety of line lengths, her whimsy. From “Nugget and Dust”
…I told lies
in order to tell the truth,
something I still do. It was hard
to imagine a world in tune
without his attention
to its bewildering filters, emergency
breaks, without his measured tread. Diligent world,
silly world! Where keys turn and idiot lights
signal numinous privations.
From “Orientation Day in Hades” she brings together Disney
and Detroit. In
fact, I loved her Detroit poems, especially now
that I have more adult knowledge of what the personality of the city of Detroit
is.
Fulton tried to integrate meanings of the world palladium to
hold all the poems together section by section, similarly to James Thomas Stevens with Bulle/Chimere but Stevens does it better. Where Fulton excels are her fresh wiley similes
in densely packed poems.
She deals with machinery but not in a cold, clinical
way—with lush and laden prettiness: “The Wreckeage Entrepreneur,” and ”When Bosses
Sank Steel
Islands.” She can come across as unemotional in
“My Second Marriage to my First Husband” but then addresses the physical
complications of flirting in “Scumbling.” Sometimes she slips into stream of
consciousness as in “Aunt Madelyn At the White Sale.”
One of my favorites was the football poem, “Men’s Studies:
Roman De La Rose.” The third stanza of “On the Charms of the Absentee Gardens”
is a haunting depiction of the World
Trade Center
(considering this book was published in 1986):
…We need such leavings—
not to tell the seasons but to help us
imagine famine, fire, abandonment. To help us see
catastrophe—the mesa as the basal column of a bomb drop.
Some say remnants of the World
Trade
Center will leave much to
be desired.
but isn’t that a ruin’s purpose—to be less
than satisfactory, only partly
knowable, far gone, not fully
lovely, changing each observer into architect?
To make a posthistory wonder
what god needed a prosthesis
of compressed, freestanding steel, Monolith, a rock
band, fired ingenious music through the bars
of Troy
when I was seventeen.
The book ends with a note on the loss of her father in
“Traveling Light”
Behind me the ocean
stares down the clouds, the little last remaining
light, as if to remind me of the nothing
I will always have
to fall back on.
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