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Patricia Carlin's Poems Exhibit Her Intimacy With 20th Century Modernism

By Djelloul (Del) Marbrook

Quantum Jitters, Patricia Carlin, Marsh Hawk Press, 2009, 77pp.

There is always a temptation to call the disposition of words on a page experimental when they seem asymmetrical or do not conform to familiar metrical schemes and ideas about prosody. But there is another and, I think, better way to contemplate a restless, unfamiliar poetics like Patricia Carlin's in Quantum Jitters, her second book.

Some poets, certainly not all, study prosody so intently that the right form begins to take shape the instant the founding recognition of a poem occurs. Idea summons form. The poet doesn't say to herself, I'm going to write a sonnet or a set of quatrains. Instead, the idea says to the poet, This is the way I want to be written, and the poet, being one as practiced as Carlin, says, Okay, I see where this is going.

And then there is the question of whether the idea wants to keep going in that direction, as with a sonnet that is once set in motion, or says, I want to change course now, I think a couple of tercets were just fine for starters, but now I think a broad prose line is just the ticket.

So do you end up with an overturned table and notes scattered on the floor, or do you end up with an ordered prosody that gets the job done in the manner of an abstract sculptor, say? Well, it depends on whether you are as magisterial as Carlin. Her intimacy with 20th Century modernism emerges in her poems the way Robert Motherwell's paintings broke upon the mid-century, fully conceived, sure-handed and profoundly intellectual.

There is a certain analogy between Motherwell's advent and the earlier emergence of the prolific poet e.e. cummings, whose poems seemed to arrive in a state of undress, no punctuation, no capitalization, verbs for nouns, nouns for verbs. Some critics dismissed the work as pretentious eccentricity. Others saw it as consummate modernism, a kind of aerodynamism in poetics. In retrospect it may be seen that cummings' choice of fairly conventional subject matter enabled us to take our seats in his iconoclastic forms. Some even argued that he wasn't as modern as he seemed to be. Motherwell, on the other hand, wasn't so obliging. His black canvases, for example, are uncompromising in their painterliness and their intellectual demands. And this may be said of Carlin, too. She does not give the reader any aha moments. But this is not to say she is a difficult poet or even an inaccessible one. It is merely to say she is unpretentious in her determination to find and engage the mental and psychological frontiers of the world around her. You can, if your eye is sharp and your mind open, engage the brushstrokes and nuances of Motherwell's black spaces as excitedly and wonderingly as you would a Titian; it just depends on how susceptible you are to bias. Usually what we call modern is an apprehension of ideas in the Zeitgeist, a kind of artistic syllogism in which what is going around comes around. Modernists are awake to the present and sometimes see around the corner.

I think this sensibility is present in the first poem of the Carlin collection, called "Untitled." We are coming toward something, the poet says, establishing the premise of Quantum Jitters, a felicity and coherence that introduces the passenger to the engineer. This said, we'll see what we're coming toward. And by the middle of the collection in a poem called "This Distance" we have a very clear idea of what sort of things Carlin is willing to engage and how she intends to engage them. Here is the first stanza:

where not to say the ground
and mean forever
makes no sense, means nothing;
means only
you can't remember how you were carried here-
the body of a life,
the sky of its sometime ending.

This poem, with its title eliding into its first line, has the resonance of sanded teak, words sounded so well that there can be no other logical way to join them. There is a kind of joiner's choice going on: a knot appears and the builder must decide whether to excise it like a tumor or integrate it into his work. Just say the first two lines aloud to hear what I mean; they're perfect. But the stanza as a whole embodies the poet's concern for the engagement of specificity ( ground, sky) and abstraction (nothing, forever, ending). If an abstract thing can be said to have an odor or a weave Carlin may very well join it to a running line, and if it doesn't tip its hat to William Carlos Williams or H.D., well, this isn't the 20th Century anymore.

There is in those first two lines a demeanor characteristic of Carlin's work. The first line, where not to say the ground, rises, but the second line, and mean forever, unexpectedly falls, and this is because Carlin doesn't go anywhere predictable and one has the feeling that she often arrives at an unexpected place with a certain degree of exhilaration, as if her own skill and excellent ear had thrown open a door of which she hadn't been aware, not unlike the rock icon Jim Morrison of The Doors was wont to do. This aspect of her work signals her a superb tactician. It's one thing to decide that doing something, making a poem, for example, requires a certain strategy, but it's quite another thing to be able to improvise when things turn out unpredictably. It's what distinguished Alexander the Great from other generals. It's not that a problem turns up, it's rather that an opportunity appears, and only the very best poets seize that opportunity and enhance it; the others try to wrestle it back to their original strategy. This is why poetry is adventure.

What makes it difficult for a blogger to shed light on her work is that software like WordPress, which I use here, doesn't permit the kind of typography that would demonstrate Carlin's genius, whereas more traditional poetics can be rendered more accurately. That's a shame, but it happens to writers like me who are not famous enough to earn the services of typographers. For this reason, I must limit the poems I discuss to her more conventional forms.

That said, take "So Few Choices / In The Difficult Galaxy," the poem on page 39. The slash in the title foreshadows a recurrent device and is important, as all Carlin's devices are. It's not exactly a caesura, which could have been achieved without a slash and which she uses, as did C.P. Cavafy, frequently and to excellent effect. Instead, the slash invites you wonder where so few choices exist before telling you. The slash arrests the eye. One of the pleasures of reading Quantum Jitters-and this was as true of her first book, Original Green-is contemplating her personal notation. She is by no means a forbidding poet. She is readily accessible once you trouble yourself to pick up the demeanor of her thought. It's not unlike watching two youngsters walking out onto a dance floor and studying each other's moves for a second before getting into the swing of the dance.

Here are the first eight lines of "So Few Choices":

Up on hands and knees
seduced

If I stand / in the doorway of tomorrow
I'll see my chair turned at its usual angle...

There is a great deal to admire in these eight modest lines once you accept that nothing is arbitrary where Carlin is concerned. She is as careful about her metrics as a mathematician constructing an algorithm. The first couplet is subtly, surprisingly erotic, simply because it sets our minds to work. But the next couplet is sternly intellectual and goes in a different, more demanding direction. Then come the two succinct sentences of the third couplet. Why are they bracketed? Not parenthesized, but bracketed. In mathematics brackets indicate a formula. In architecture they support something. In rhetoric they interject. I would suggest Carlin means all these things. We need to know that snow had not fallen, but it was possible. We need to know there was no music because there might have been.

Now comes an element of surrealism. If tomorrow is unfamiliar, why should the poet see her chair in it, turned at its usual angle? But we're getting ahead of the poem, because she has not said she will stand in that doorway, she is saying rather she thinks she knows what will happen if she does. And this is a conundrum, is it not, in which we often find ourselves? We think we know what would happen if we did this or that, but we're not sure because the galaxy is, after all, difficult, as the poet said at the outset.

I like this poem for its stoic terseness, for its spartan modernity, and for the quandary it is.

The seven-part poem preceding this poem is "Sky Again, With Knowledge." It is one of the book's major projects, and it ends in a way that I think typifies Carlin's way of navigating the intellectual and emotional challenges she is eager to confront:

Now the days are sweeter than they used to be.
Now is the world I dreamed about
tethered to weeds and all other intrusions;

The first line of that concluding stanza—this poem is twelve pages long—is innocent, disarming. The next line is like the long reliever in baseball, a bridge, hopefully a sturdy one, to the closer, to closure. And the closing line, a quote from Ann Lauterback's "Psyche's Dream," is as subtle as three strikes in a row thrown by Mariano Rivera. You can spend a lifetime thinking about that line. And what about that semicolon? Does it open the way to the next poem? Sure it does. But what if there were no next poem? To what then would it open a way? All those other intrusions? We know a lot about intrusions, especially the women among us. And there is nothing conclusive about them, so there should be no period and probably not even an explosive colon. No, the semicolon is perfect, because the intrusions in our lives have consequences, things follow them. I don’t know any poets more subtle than this, or more effective.

The British poet Jim Burns, who is a scholar of our Beat Era, wrote to me not long ago that Maxwell Bodenheim, who was once known as the King of the Bohemians, had striven mightily to interest the literary lights of hisday in Hart Crane's poetry, but to no avail. I think of this often because we are enduring a vogue of fairly inconsequential poetry that does not disturb our trips to the mall. I don't equate Patricia Carlin with Crane, because her work is not as enigmatic and ambiguous, but hers is work that engages the intellect and is unafraid of abstraction and speculation. Not the kind of work Dr. Williams might have approved, but he, like Hemingway and Eliot and Pound, has done his work and is having his influence, and there is no reason for us to regard such giants as lords of the canon, for each time makes its own canon.

I was reading Crane devotedly the year Bodenheim died, the year, 1954, when he was murdered in Greenwich Village. I was in the Navy by then. Just as Finnegan's Wake, which I read before Joyce's other work, had failed to stop me from inordinately admiring Joyce, so The Brooklyn Bridge failed to discourage me from Crane. I loved his opacities as much as his soaring intellectual ambition. And I see that Carlin takes on similar risks in a time when we're not demanding much of poets and settling for less.

I remember carrying money from my Aunt Irene to Max Bodenheim. I remember telling him with great deference that I wrote poems. He had been cadging drinks at Chumley's, but he grabbed my shoulders and stared into my eyes and said, Good, and don't ever stop, because you don't know how many goddam things depend on it. And I didn't know. But I have taken his advice to heart. Patricia Carlin does know, and I have a hunch that when she was the age I was then, about sixteen, she knew even then, because such long consideration shows in her work. Yes, poems count, and if we had sense we would take them more seriously than the blatherings of politicians. The poets are telling us where it's at, and if they don't know they usually have the courage to say so. Did you ever know a politician or pundit of whom you could say that?

When I wrote about Michael Roy Meyerhofer's Leaving Iowa a few months ago I said he was the kind of poet who makes heroes of his publishers. That is equally true of Carlin, and her press, Marsh Hawk, has not failed her. The production qualities and editing of Quantum Jitters are first rate, as one might expect of a press devoted to exploring poetry's affinities with the visual arts. Marsh Hawk has published forty-six poets in a project that inevitably calls to mind the synergy of French poets and artists.

The avant-garde of a period is usually thought of as experimental. In some ways this is misleading, because the very best poets and artists of a period are hyper-vigilant, so aware as to find it necessary to design and redesign tools to manifest their awareness among us. I think they're called experimental for lack of a better word. They are instinctively engaging the one subject nobody else wants to engage, the subject about which there is a thunderous consensual silence, and they have ransacked (remember Rimbaud) the times for its secret scents, its forbidden wonts.

Djelloul (jeh-lool) Marbrook was born in 1934 in Algiers to a Bedouin father and an American painter. He grew up in Brooklyn, West Islip and Manhattan, New York, where he attended Dwight Preparatory School and Columbia. He then served in the U.S. Navy.

Djelloul Marbrook

The pioneering Online Originals (U.K.), the only online publisher to receive a Booker nomination, published his novella, Alice Miller's Room, in 1999. Recent fiction appeared in Prima Materia (Woodstock, NY), vols. I and IV, and Breakfast All Day (London, U.K.).In his younger days his poetry was published in literary journals including Solstice (England) and Beyond Baroque and Phantasm (California). Recent poems appear in Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review (www.arabesquespress.org), Perpetua Mobile (Baltimore), and Attic (Baltimore). He is the English language editor of Arabesques Literary and Cultural Journal (www.arabesquespress.org).

He worked as a reporter for The Providence Journal and as an editor for The Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette, The Baltimore Sun, The Winston-Salem Journal & Sentinel and The Washington Star. Later he worked as executive editor of four small dailies in northeast Ohio and two medium-size dailies in northern New Jersey.

Source: The Student Operated Press

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