Reflections on Anxiety and Hazard
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry Reflections on Anxiety and Hazard By Phoebe Pettingell Back in the 1940s, W.H. Auden labeled his era "the age of anxiety." The tag can be tied to the present as well. Almost weekly...
...Once it was a teeming capital famous for "exquisite/ Libraries or whores...
...In the closing couplet she frets "in pentameter/ harboring hope, yet failure's amateur...
...And was just, say...
...the mind fragments...
...Anyone who has experienced therapy will recognize the steps recounted in this volume...
...These are the interior personas we hate to acknowledge to ourselves, much less to an outsider: "I hope you'll never meet them," Ackerman tells her therapist and us...
...As in traditional psychoanalysis, you don't see the analyst...
...This playfulness is not arch but anxious...
...Elsewhere, she acknowledges, I loved how the poems served as pegs, flagstaff's, banisters, telegraph poles, crutches, shafts, hitching posts, or tongues, depending on our whereabouts...
...cancer cells metastasize...
...Cancer," despite its grim subject, whimsically compares the uncontrolled cell division that defines the disease to "the manic drive to choke/ On itself that fairy tales allot the gnome/ Who vainly hammers the broken sword in his cave...
...This lyric resonates with many echoes from the poetic canon: from Andrew Marvell assuring his coy mistress that, given time, his "vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires, and more slow," to Dante Gabriel Rossetti observing the details of a plant, "The Woodspurge," in the midst of some unnamed heartbreak...
...The most impressive feature of McClatchy's verse, though, is the way his passionate feelings penetrate the intricate forms and clever wordplay...
...Ackerman actually sent these poems to her therapist...
...In "A Note to Readers,' Ackerman explains how her book emerged from a rather unusual therapeutic approach: "My analyst and I lived in distant towns...
...Almost weekly we are warned of "possible" unspecified terrorist acts...
...The author often affectionately sends up various clichés of therapy...
...A charity provoked By guilt is straw in the fire compassion avows, lam meant to offer with no display The what-I-am instead of the what-I-have, All of it, the manic and mean, And then to stand aside the better to mull On blowsy Fortune nodding off Behind the wheel of her gilded, greased machine, And Mary Magdalene holding her skull...
...The development of drugs like Prozac and Paxil not withstanding, men and women with varying degrees of training continue to hang up shingles and advertise themselves as ready to listen to the problems of strangers...
...McClatchy's words, by contrast, carry the misery of the wound...
...So who doesn't think he's inherited An apartment too small for his plans...
...Hazmat's separate poems are imaginatively unified by their curious one-word titles...
...Still, some basic human drive seeks to stitch everything back together, to take pleasure in the "French blue afternoon," in poetry that puts fragments into a resonant context, in the dream of an all-consuming love, or maybe simply a perfect meal...
...then she becomes enamored of the analyst through the process of transference, only to find herself confronting the difficulty that brought her into treatment...
...Auden is McClatchy's poetic master...
...Part of the appeal of his mature work lies in the constant tension between passion and control...
...But he can use humor, too, in an engagingly self-mocking fashion...
...Glanum" tours the eponymous ancient Roman city that is now a part of southern France...
...The women and children first...
...Scientists gloomily estimate the potential death toll of biological warfare...
...In the light of what has come before, we recognize this admission as an affirmation of the human need to reach out to others, in spite of the risk of being damaged once more, because we are social animals dependent on relationships...
...In J.D...
...The book's finale, "Ouija," invokes the memory of James Merrill, utilizing the same stanza form the older poet used for "The Book of Ephraim"-which explored his own debt to Auden...
...But today's nervousness is not simply a reaction to real or perceived threats from the outside...
...Sure...
...between renunciation and abundance...
...But they wish not to wish you to, and so will use any excuse to cower in secret, holding their bellies and whims...
...Her latest collection...
...But, given the premise of this book, it should be noted that the occasional descent into self-pity or self-righteousness is part of the therapeutic journey...
...But they quarrel for air and there's never enough skin to cover all their sores, never enough tonic to quench their lidless thirst...
...Her appeal stems from her ability to traverse personal divides, to span her intelligence and impetuosity, her whimsy and deep feelings, her evasiveness and vulnerability, her profound worries and equally powerful optimism...
...We have lost the Enlightenment's conviction that willpower and principles can overcome all personal obstacles...
...As Hazmat demonstrates, McClatchy stands as an equal beside his two great influences, a fresh bard of this new age of anxiety...
...Ackerman has always enjoyed building bridges: between the scientific and the sensuous (she is a nature writer as well as a poet...
...Largesse" puzzles over the uneasy motivations that prompt us to give lavish gifts: the suppressed hostility behind our effort to overwhelm the recipient...
...between technical vocabulary and metaphorical language...
...Pleasure's flushed archivist, and death's pale herald...
...To counterbalance lapses, there are some skillful uses of form, including a Shakespearean sonnet commenting on the fear of intimacy, but also of abandonment: Suppose I make a swift pre-emptive strike and leave you first, before our circle's run...
...Often they are the names of musical forms, like "Fado" (a type of Portuguese love song) and "Pibroch" (an elaborate series of variations for bagpipe...
...Hazmat exhibits particular "fascination with the flaws" that make betrayal of self and others inevitable...
...Agony was filtered through wit and levity, or muted by poignant, humbling realizations...
...Next time we will almost surely repeat the same pattern of extravagant generosity, hoping to get it right, while our saner selves whisper that such behavior provokes resentment and self-disgust in giver and recipient alike...
...That is, after all, the deepest reason for poetry...
...Auden and Merrill placed a layer of selfdeprecation between the heat of an emotion and its expression...
...The book is divided into four parts: "An Alchemy of Mind," "The Heart's Asylum," "Another Form of Midnight," and "Beginning to End...
...However most weeks we spoke by telephone, which in some ways allowed greater intimacy and risk...
...The poems she composed daily during this period acted as "paper bridges" that "reach/ between felt and spoken,/ a gulf freight must cross/ to reach the trade routes of said...
...Broadly speaking, they trace a classic pattern for a patient...
...Here there are two: a depressed eight-year-old, obsessed with "the war crimes of...
...An old habit, and not one that I like, but I can panic...
...Jihad," employing the language of Islamic fundamentalism, describes how dissatisfaction with our own fallibility can be projected outward as fanaticism...
...for many the poet's metaphors may help illuminate the path, or at least make it appear more scenic...
...A telephone receiver is perforated like a confessional screen, you miss the shame of eye contact, the other's voice seems to originate inside your head, mental portraits of the other form while you're talking, and so on...
...Do I cancel the party or gamely shrug...
...Once a month or so I would visit him in his office...
...They become petty, violent, disloyal, self-destructive...
...We call it ordinary Life-banal, wary...
...or the all-too-human impulse to buy affection, or compensate for deficiencies, or assuage our remorse for past misdeeds...
...unruly emotions are supposed to surface...
...McClatchy knows instinctively how to deflect any excessive earnestness that might degenerate into pretension-and how to redirect displays of emotion that could easily fall into bathos or hysteria...
...McClatchy's pain roils closer to the surface, barely contained by the language, sometimes flashing forth in all its rawness...
...Here is his explanation for the desire in many cultures-from the indigenous people of the South Seas to sailors and mall ratsfor "Tattoos": Figuring out the body starts with the skin, Its boundary, its edgy go-between...
...The humor lies in the notion of acting the perfect hostess to one's internal selves, trying to introduce them in a way that will make their shortcomings appear forgivable, even lovable...
...But "Now only ruins are left,/ A wall some bricks suggest/ A doorway into nothing...
...Others are naked terms like "Penis," "Cancer" or "Feces," enabling the poet to enjoy the momentary embarrassment they tend to evoke...
...At worst, some of her images seem obvious...
...Able to withdraw From chaos or the law, Intent on the body's tides And the mysteries disguised At the bedside or the hearth...
...James Merrill is his mentor...
...they were a way to reveal herself, and to allay her fears about self-exposure...
...The Agave" describes the propensity of that fleshy succulent plant to become ingrown and, so to speak, stab itself through the heart: Yesterday, the gardener told me it could take thirty years for the spike slowly-never meaning to, thinking it was headed towards the water-glare it mistook for the little light that kept not coming from above-slowly to pierce its own flesh, to sink its sorrow deep within and through its own life...
...I only stay together/ because of the children" begins "The Girls," a twist on the concept of "the inner child...
...childhood," and an 11 -year-old bursting with enthusiasm and manic rapture...
...Ackerman initially undertakes "the hard quest to be known...
...In the book's closing sentence, she writes that "caring and missing is the way of our kind...
...But Rossetti's recollection of "perfect grief" conveys the numbness that prevails when one can scarcely yet feel the anguish...
...Ackerman is also interested in the tumult within...
...Penis" massages the mechanics and ironies of the organ, not neglecting the almost universal male insecurities about size, responsiveness and hardness: Do I wish my own rose at will, and stayed put...
...As one might therefore expect, wit and virtuosity are always on display in his poems...
...two inches longer...
...More often, however, an understanding of our imperfections leads in these poems to compassionate tolerance...
...Health officials regularly announce that certain foods and medications once considered salutary actually cause the very ailments they were supposed to thwart...
...Where all things come apart...
...Do you dare touch their leprous hands...
...McClatchy's new collection of poems, Hazmat (Knopf, 96 pp., $23.00), the "hazardous materials" are our bodies and psyches: "From brimming nipple to crematory flame,/ We give ourselves to what will take/ The breath away," he avers in "Largesse...
...Some of the most worrisome afflictions come from within: our immune system may attack itself...
...One gathers from Origami Bridges that she tends toward the bipolar, as many writers and artists do...
...But skin is general-issue, a blank Identity card until it's been filled in Or covered up, in some way disguised To set us apart from the beasts, whose aspects Are given, not chosen, and the gods Whose repertoire of change-from shower of gold To carpenter's son-is limited...
...Origami Bridges: Poems of Psychoanalysis and Fire (HarperCollins, 160 pp., $22.95), revolves around one of the most notable characteristics of modem and postmodern culture-"talk therapy...
...Much contemporary literature tells the tale of deluded individuals forced to confront elements of themselves they most want to disown...
...and ultimately she gains a measure of insight and mastery of her condition...
...Members mingle uncomfortably, Play crazy-eights, snore...
...The scarred, outspoken witness at its trials, The monitor of its memories...
...In "Unlawful Assembly," When the Secret Society of Selves meets, it calls no one to order, avows no creed, follows no agenda, hangs guns and masks at the door...
...It only took me a month...
...Yet at the same time she wants us to do so: They wish you d be their savior, fiend, lover, and muse...
...But few among us are capable of the degree of detachment this equivocal conclusion seems to ask...
...Trains and trucks filled with toxic chemicals or nuclear waste rumble along poorly maintained rails and roads, endangering the populations of towns in their path...
...He frequently focuses on the difficulty of finding the right balance between warring claims...
...Ackerman sometimes takes spontaneity to an extreme and sounds slapdash...
Vol. 85 • September 2002 • No. 5
