Ted Bookey

HUMANIMAL: On the poetry of Wayne Atherton

Humanimal, by Wayne Atherton. Cafe Review Press, 2002, ISSN 1069-7179 I am always on the lookout for new texts to bring to the attention of the seniors I teach a poetry appreciation course to at the University of Maine. And I want, in this review, to say why "Humanimal," a beautifully printed and illustrated page turner collection of 40 stylistically diverse poems written by Wayne Atherton is one such book. Atherton is a high wire poet whose poems skip and somersault as he juggles and balances words on the thin line that separates the two major linguistic modalities. In most texts the words are transparent. We look through them to the objects they represent, expect they'll make sense, ignore; coloration is distraction. Of course there's more to language than meaning: sound, feeling tone, texture, how words undergo changes put next to one another, their music. In poetry language wants to call attention to itself, moves toward opacity, At one extreme, it makes a kind of sense closer to music or abstract painting. In poets like Gertrude Stein it can even seem to be noise without signal, unsatisfied merely to mean, awash with language as "stuff," as if it has set out to fatigue the thesaurus. In poetry an awareness of the textures of signs can put us in mind of the textures of actual things. But the relation between them remains quite arbitrary as in any other use of language; it is just that poetry tries to iconicise that relation, make it appear somehow inevitable. Words may not be things, but the poet invests them as though they were. Does language transport the writer to the heart of reality, or does messing around with the stuff substitute for that reality like a toy? This distinction was an important one for my students. What makes a certain poem a poem, they asked about many the 20th century poems I introduced for discussion? Again and again it came up. Some poems seemed to them more prose than poetry. Wasn't there supposed to be a noticeable difference? Or: some poems sound good, but they don't appear to yield meaning. It seemed they sought a poetry that would be unproblematic, and would make a glad sound. Some had taken the class because they'd tried to understand it on their own and been frustrated. The consensus, more or less, was that poetry had lost its way to them, become deservedly marginalized because it did nothing for them that prose at its best could. It had a forbidding aspect, did not reflect their lives. They took it on faith that, as Mark Twain said about Wagner's music, it was probably better than it sounded. They had hoped there was something of worth and importance that would show itself to them in the course of our study. Those off-the-rack-poems of yesteryear, that "satisfying" poetry they'd read in school years earlier - where had it gone? Rome, they knew, wasn't diminished in a day, but things seemed to have gotten topsy turvey, all beforewards & afterhand! They craved a poetry that would behave as if it wanted to be understood. Eventually, they did begin to digest the rich variety and pleasures of contemporary poetry (what foods these morsels be!), to appreciate the porous boundaries between the transparent and opaque, the mix of meaning and sensuousness of the verse's surface life, the sense of its being written at the quick of flesh and blood experience of the world. They wanted the heightened thrill of receiving language languaging that can be found at its best in poetry. The poems of "HUMANIMAL" (the elision of Human Animal to the single noun strikes me as a more accurate, less arrogant way of describing us to ourselves) contain lines that spill over us with the energy of Ginsberg's Howl (Word Guernica). There are poems in this collection that are so crowded with a density of sound and meaning that circle around one another without dizzying coherence or annulling emotionality Atherton has a repertoire of styles so varied it's as if "HUMANIMAL" might be the work of several different poets were they not clearly the product of a single and singular sensibility-one voice lavishing a various music. Atherton is a master of the terse aphorism that tilts toward a witty and informed skepticism. From a half dozen poems this grab bag: In sin our great divide connects us all. How many fallen angels will it take to reverse heaven's gravity? There are no flags in Paradise. History is speculation in retrospect, or / Retrospeculation I shall be famous for all that I did not do, / for the man that I will never be. Always the war is fought between sword and sheath Complete / absence of love discovers insanity. In PASSION FLOWERS: TWELVE HAIKU he brings off a float-like-a-butterfly, sting-like-a-bee eroticism: Now we are apart, Lonely intimate strangers. Tonight we will meet Your milk thighs open. Kneeling down I part my lips, Making sketch with tongue. It rises and droops. Amused, you watch like a cat - But your claws are soft. and move beyond the haiku moment to the tension located between moral judgment and the pull of the erotic. Here is his PAMELA in its entirety: She was judged by a jury of peers-Bullshit! She was judged by mice, and she the great mysterious purring cat, evil sublime and alert in a field of twittering trash-hungry mice. They said her eyes were cold. There are prison-hardened women waiting her arrival in the New Hampshire State Pen. Can you imagine? them licking their lips-how about the men? How many secretly wished they could have sleep with her just once. The sharp social consciousness in evidence here is evoked in several of his poems. JUST ONCE, VICARIOUSLY, in which the loquacious bigot bar-fly the synecdoche with which the poem begins with the line "the suit at the bar" sets the tone for the next four: didn't let on that he knew who was sitting next to him. "you know what really pisses me off? nails the type - we've all met him, holding forth from the stool, or on the long, bus ride trapped in the seat beside him. There are several terrific catalog poems I quote: rain expands its vocabulary to the sea learns salt born in fleeting mass of cloud affecting and effecting mood building flood making mud from dirt rain by rivulet wiper blade rain smear on windshield rain on roof recycled rain rain spinning off bicycle tire fire hissing at rain lovers kissing in the rain licking rain off a lover's lips breasts thighs there in that little hollow just about your navel rain forest of glistening hairs… poem getting distracted by the erotic implications of rain movie set rain red and blue neon sigh rain puddle reflection night rain listening to Coltrane rain the rain in Maine falls mainly on the weekend Pemigewasset river rain Pemaquid rain Indian burial ground rain gravestone rain blood running with rain through civil war death trench rainbow! you can never get rained on by the same rain twice. -NOT ANOTHER SONG ABOUT THE RAIN I love the self-recursive moment in the poem where, as if overwhelmed by its own horny rhetoric, it pulls back for a moment to say how it "get[s] distracted by the erotic implications of rain." And the wit of "the rain in Maine that falls mainly on the weekend"-funny, it sends an elbow to its own ribs. Sharp stuff! As is the joyous word play of: "Do I got an abbreviated rectum or a deviant sexton." And "There's graffiti on my tipi and a whole lot of dread in my head"-both from Fragmental Scrap Hooks. Reading through the six divisions of "HUMANIMAL" it's as if you are following the affective movements of a suite. The lento, Section 5 ( A LIFE LIVED OUTSIDE), is made up of 11 quiet, passionate, sculpted, poems that include eleven meditations on waters, mountains, birds and skies, light, trees, fire, and the tragic raids of the human on the living world "where, sun, moon, and stars/ have been in orbit with this earth/much longer than our great need / to make history." And in the eleventh wisely, sadly speaks to resolution of that alienation man has imposed on his habitat: I cite the first and last two stanzas of number 11: I came here to find peace but found in others I met… something of myself I could not comprehend. All this human life is a path marked & slashed with symbols. ………………… I must find the unmarked path into wild places unknown and once there… leave no trace. -from A LIFE LIVED OUTSIDE The 6th and final section, the meditation on the human condition shifts, this time to our capacity and instinct for making art. Atherton, has an enormous reach of voice and modulation and a synoptic world view that requires that magnitude of reach in order to fully achieve its articulation. Atherton, at the beginning of "HUMANIMAL" cites Larry River's: "I go from this to that, and why be ashamed of it? It seems to me this is the human experience." Atheron's poems provide a comprehensive gloss on River's grand vision of the sweep of what it is to be a human being. It is this that the poems of "HUMANIMAL" so passionately elaborate and celebrate, and I will be happy to reccommend the to my classes. And, it should go without saying, to you too, Reader. A nice bonus: throughout are a series of hand-mounted reproductions of original artwork (mixed media collage, drawings, pastels, photography). Each of the 125 copies, a note explains, will feature a different configuration and selection of images, thus making each copy completely different from the rest. Ted Bookey teaches poetry in the Senior College program at The University of Maine in Augusta. Mixty Motions, a collection of his poems, has been published by Nightshade Press. With his wife Ruth he has translated the German poet Erich Kästner, published by Red Dancefloor Press. He is the Program Director for the Live Poets' Society of Maine

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