Michael S. Begnal reviews
by Mark Lavorato
As many do, when a
work by a writer previously unknown to me crosses my desk, I read the blurbs in
order to get a sense of context. When I
was asked to review Mark Lavorato’s poetry collection, Wayworn Wooden Floors (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2012), I learned from
the back cover that these “frank and thoughtful poems” would be “penned in
accessible, unpretentious verse, which is as clear as it is varied in form,
tone and vantage”. What, though, does
this really mean? What is inherently
valuable about poetry that is supposedly “unpretentious”? With a number of notable exceptions (Bukowski being one example that comes
to mind), I have to admit that I’m not always that much of a fan of “accessible”
poetry, anyway. Accessibility, important
when the rhetorical moment calls for it, is not an inherent virtue. Accessibility is also subjective: what is
difficult for one reader may not be for another. Personally, I tend to like poetry that forces
me to do a little bit of work. Not that
poetry should be deliberately “inaccessible” — again, such a question of
comprehensibility will depend on the contingencies involved in such considerations
such as the process of the composition and audience. And for that matter, poetry or language that
might initially appear straightforward can often be deceptively complex (take William Carlos Williams’s “The Red
Wheelbarrow”, for example). But when poetry
such as that in Wayworn Wooden Floors
seemingly wants to pretend ignorance of certain formal developments in the field
over the last hundred years or so, its stated subject matter of “the tragedy
and the comedy endemic to daily existence” does little for me.
Certainly,
Lavorato is sincere here. As he writes
in “The Shades of Your Black”, an ode to a crow, “all I want/ is what you have/
freedom so pure it’s invisible”. But is
it possible, in the aftermath of postmodernism, to convincingly put forward
poetry that “reward[s] readers with poignant, emotionally genuine vignettes” (the
back cover again) without at least some awareness of how the medium might skew the
author’s attempt at “genuine” emotion? The
poet and critic Johannes Göranson,
for one, would say no. Writing on the Montevidayo blog about “the new sincerity,”
he recently averred,
One part about this rhetoric of sincerity that really
makes me resist it, it’s the way it seems to remove the troubles of language. .
. . Another thing I dislike about the sincerity discussions is that they seem
to be kind of normative. People are
sincere when they write poetry about a certain — acceptable — range of
emotions. I.e. you’re sincere when you’re kind of sad, or kind of funny. . .
But the second you get too intense, perverse, ludicrous etc you become somehow
insincere. . . . This leads to boring poetry that feels very restrained to me,
poetry that seems involved in a humanist idea of interiority.
Now, there’s
probably more that could be said about “sincerity”, but I understand where he’s
coming from on this. I do also think, to
go further, that it’s eminently possible for an awareness of the limitations of
language and a desire for sincerity to play off of each other and for these
different impulses and awarenesses to coexist in a successful work of art. In their essay “Notes on Metamodernism”(2011), Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, while among the
voices sounding the death-knell of postmodernism, allow that the metamodernist
paradigm that now supersedes it moves between different poles: “metamodernism oscillates
. . . between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and
melancholy, . . . unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and
ambiguity. . . . One should be careful not to think of this oscillation as a
balance however; rather, it is a pendulum swinging between . . . innumerable
poles”. Thus, a possible weariness with
“postmodern irony/fragmentation” does not mean one has to (or can) dispense
with the awareness of language as a medium.
The only thing is,
it doesn’t appear as if Lavorato in Wayworn
Wooden Floors is very much aware of this ongoing conversation at all. Whatever about a “new sincerity”, he seems
never to have questioned the “old” one. While
the poem “Recordar” eschews stable truths and end with the lines, “Every word
ever written/ is a fiction/ Necessary, pulsating, wondrous/ fiction”, the
implications of this are not acted upon in most of the rest of the collection. “Camino de Santiago”, about the famous
pilgrimage route, aims to impart some deeper meaning but ends with a cliché: “It
is the miles we amble/ not running from anything/ not searching for anything/
that we find”. Elsewhere, insights are baldly
stated, where they might instead have been implied through the often skilful
work of the poem itself. For example,
“Harbour Seal” is rife with engaging imagery, but the need to then deliberately,
overtly explain the meaning of this encounter between man and seal (“I thought
about the exchange. . .”) left me feeling underwhelmed.
Any book review is
subjective, obviously. I’ve put my
cards, or at least some of my own present concerns about poetry, on the table,
as much as I can in such a short piece. Perhaps
those with other concerns (or none at all) will be able to read between the
lines if they wish, because as much as I find aspects of this book problematic,
it is not to say that it lacks merit.
This is the début collection of someone who the biographical information
suggests is primarily a novelist. His
powers of description and his obvious facility with words serve him well here,
from a “desert of saturate light” (“Swallow”) to the “Sun dangling bald from an
unseen wire, gestapo-bulb sway” (“Ninth Street North”). And who is to say that there aren’t readers
out there who simply look to poetry to touch them on some common,
comprehensible (“accessible”), quotidian (“daily existence”) level? The argument is often made that the “difficulty”
or “obscurity” of much contemporary poetry is what has led to its
marginalization. I don’t think it’s at
all as simple as that, but perhaps for many this is true. If Wayworn
Wooden Floors is somehow able to reach a wider audience than the dwindling
one that “experimental,” “avant-garde” or “other” poetry has supposedly been
reduced to, if it can touch the broad swath of people that the phraseology of
its back matter suggests is its goal, then I would certainly be happy for it.
Michael S. Begnal’s
new collection is Future Blues
(Salmon Poetry, 2012).
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