Two Routes to Reality

...Turin, where Nietzsche fell ill in 1889, was the fi rst capital of unifi ed Italy...

...I can’t get enough of you...

...To wreathe is to curl, writhe, or spiral...

...That brings the house down...

...The wreath for Nietzsche that Hass has in mind is pliant, changeable, and adaptable...

...They stay out late / Blinking their signs to advertise / STUD WANTED and BRIGHT MALE SEEKS MATE,” while Hass catalogs what he sees, citing everything from those living in Vermeer’s time to the materials used for his painting, “the brush,” “volatile,” “oils / Of linseed, rapseed,” “essence / Of pinewood in a can of turpentine...

...For her part, the woman, now seated across the table during dinner, lets her mind run this way: “She fi nds herself thinking what a literal man he is, / Notices, as if she were recalling it, his pleasure / In the menu...

...Italy was fi rst in fascism...

...Here is a different route to reality, Robert Hass’s “A Supple Wreath of Myrtle”: Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother Mails to him from Basel...

...He ought to be declared a national resource and excused from taxation...

...But Kennedy’s character has encountered a hyperbolic bounce or two on the way down...

...Hass is like Elizabeth Bishop in that readers recognize the visual infl uence of modernist practice, but seeing such infl uence makes the originality of the poetry that much more impressive...

...And X.J...

...The Nazis were effi cient butchers...

...Of the fi refl ies in the fi rst of these Kennedy says, “Somehow their incandescent dance / Obscures our dark view of the dark’s / Enormity as they advance...

...Over and over, he enters the furrow...

...Thus, Hass opens his book with the two-line poem “Iowa, January”: “In the long winter nights, a farmer’s dreams are narrow...

...Where does this come from...

...Basel, the source of Nietzsche’s sausage, is a Swiss city north of Turin close to Bismarck’s Germany...

...At the heart of all this suffering, Nietzsche’s and that of modern Europe, lies a recurrent shape, whether seen in a sausage, a fl ower’s “dangling spur,” the geographical shape of Italy where fascism began, or the mobile part of syphilis...

...The answer, one concludes, is a resounding no...

...Anyone who has heard Kennedy perform this poem during one of his readings will remember the event...

...The spirochete found in syphilis is shaped like a sausage and even has an outer sheath like that of a sausage, and the myrtle shares the same shape in its fi ve petals and sepals, while the columbine has fi ve spurs that, in their turn, are of similar shape...

...The fusion of tense here (“she thinks,” “it seemed”) is like the fusion of understood time, the time and material of the book’s title poem...

...And so the circle of associations goes...

...The poem asks, “Is seeing believing...

...There is the aggregating power of description by which he builds linearly...

...Whether found in experience or in art, Kennedy and Hass agree that reality exists as it resists, stays on by standing off...

...Dying of syphilis...

...He applies his tunefulness to a loss of meaning, even as he has the grace to make us laugh...

...There is a toughminded yet celebratory quality to each of these poets...

...Kennedy is admired for such fi ne early poems as “Nude Descending a Staircase” and “Nothing in Heaven Functions as It Ought,” but his New and Selected Poems provides an impressive array of more recent work...

...And putting chaos to familiar tunes is just one way Kennedy tricks out the dissonances he hears...

...Robert Hass is one of our very best poets...

...The worn-out woman in the Secaucus bar is a comic version of a familiar blues type, the persona of Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out,” say...

...Kennedy’s In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus and Robert Hass’s Time and Materials take different paths to reality...

...Again the time involved confl ates (“as if she were recalling it”) so then and now stand inseparable in the most realistic theater we have, understanding...

...Often Kennedy is most serious when most funny...

...Why interrupt with ears The dumbshow of the dark...

...Scaled, tailed, and fi netooth-boned, Descending, you and I Have left our eyes upstairs, For what’s there to remark...

...Nietzsche had a naive admiration for soldiery, and as his Zarathustra praised tragedies and crucifi xions, he also praised bullfi ghts...

...Bizet’s best known opera is Carmen, a story about a woman who abandons a soldier for a bullfi ghter...

...It is a supple (that is, a pliant) memorial offered for Nietzsche who was twisted to madness by his disease...

...Nietzsche, “dying of syphilis,” trims his “luxuriant mustache...

...Two are “Song: Great Chain of Being” and “Song to the Tune of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal.’” The fi rst opens, “Drinking smooth wine in a castle or digging potatoes knee-deep in dung, / Everybody in creation knew just how high or how low he hung...

...Here and gone...

...Is seeing believing...

...her answer is, “Self-hatred . . . longing for God...

...Although he was sickened by the sight of blood, Nietzsche thought strength equaled good...

...But funny as these poems are, they also have their shadows: The order we associate with melody stands in stark contrast to the chaos of the lives Kennedy describes...

...Torino (Turin) means “little bull...

...Often Robert Hass introduces a seemingly small but concrete subject, expatiates, and returns with something surprisingly comprehensive...

...For Hass, butchery, talons, spurs, fascist states, and a lethal disease are of a piece, as is one of our greatest strengths and failures, abstract thought—Nietzsche’s ability to be in love with an opera rather than a person, for example...

...Everywhere the wasteland grows...

...In the next century the Nazis would co-opt that idea...

...Secret River” displays a concrescence reminiscent of the 17th-century metaphysical poets and their descendants, even as it maintains a reserve characteristic of Kennedy alone, including a resistance to certain hierarchies of the tradition, the church for one...

...One of the great modern themes has been time, plus a hallmark of modernist poetic method has been use of the image and allusion...

...When he turns to individuals, however, he is as compassionate as any divine could hope to be...

...It is where, at the age of 25, Nietzsche held the chair in classical philology at the University of Basel, and it is the site of the fi rst meeting of the World Zionist Organization...

...Brooding on the form Of things: the dangling spur Wyatt Prunty, Carlton professor of English at the University of the South (Sewanee), is the author, most recently, of Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems Of an Alpine columbine, winter-tortured trunks Of cedar in the summer sun, the warp in the aspen’s trunk Where it torqued up through the snowpack...

...With fi nning hands we stir A petrifying river Whose overhead and fl oor Extend to touch each other...

...Mustaches of the 19th century were associated with the military, and the military was associated with strength, so if strength equaled good in Nietzsche’s mind, then a soldier or a bullfi ghter was to be admired...

...This aggregating process continues until the poem ends in a series of overlays: She sees her own avidity To live then, or not to not have lived might be more accurate, From a distance, the way a driver might see from the road A startled deer running across an open fi eld in the rain...

...Now, the poem’s argument goes, nobody knows this...

...He tosses his readers an array of ironies, amid which there are more harrumphs than hurrahs...

...Trimming a luxuriant mustache...

...Kennedy’s latest collection takes its title from a poem that is intended to be sung to the tune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike...

...Then there is “Song to the Tune of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal,’” which opens: Somebody stole my myths, Stole all their gists and piths, Somebody pinched my Juno and Pan, Crooked Dionysus And caused my spiritual crisis...

...Kennedy captures this irony with humor: “Concupiscent, the fi refl ies cruise...

...When he considers higher order, Kennedy’s general response is a shrugging laugh...

...The poem’s brevity imposes its visual power, and with January there is allusion to the Janus, double-facing god of gates and doorways (and furrows...

...When he reads this poem Kennedy takes an instrumental break during which he puts his hand to his lips to imitate a muted trumpet...

...Other times what he writes is astringently direct, “Secret River” for example: When love’s done, drooped and drowned And buried, sleep fl ows by...

...And there are other Kennedy poems meant to be sung...

...The argument here is similar to the conclusion drawn by a Hass poem entitled, “Art and Life,” which begins with a description of a painting by Vermeer and concludes, “Something stays this way, something comes alive / We cannot have, can have because we cannot have it...

...Death made it poignant, or, If not death exactly, which she’d come to think of As creatures seething in a compost, then time...

...Wild thing...

...Later, we are told, “He decides that she thinks more symbolically / Than he does and that it seemed to have saved her, / For all her fatalism, from certain kinds of pain...

...But one sees in the passage from “Then Time” quoted above that a great deal more than imagery and allusion is at work with Hass...

...A rented room, A small square window framing August clouds Above the mountain...

...Before anything else, one returns to Hass for the same reason one returns to Bishop: Both see what others miss...

...In love with the opera of Bizet...

...The Latin aquilegia of columbine is associated with aquila, “eagle,” its spurs shaped like the talons of a raptor...

...Meanwhile, the hairs of Nietzsche’s mustache curled like the spirochetes of the syphilis that infected him...

...Firefl ies,” “God’s Obsequies,” “At the Antiques Fair,” and “Secret River” are some of the most striking new poems in this collection...

...Early on when he asks, “What is this...

...A man and a woman, in a poem entitled “Then Time,” for example, have known each other for years, fi rst as lovers then as friends...

...Hass has a kaleidoscopic vision...

...The spirochete, from the Latin, spira, or coil, and chaeta, or bristle, is a shape found as commonly in nature as brutality is in human behavior...

...Each poet is an ironist who proceeds by doubt, but Kennedy’s poems display the songlike qualities of the central English lyric while Hass, who recently received the National Book Award, writes more descriptively...

...Opposing spears of stone, Limewater-rinsed, time-wrought, We lengthen till we join Our inmost tips in thought...

...woe To him whose wasteland is within...

...He operates by description, narration, and the indirect drama of relationship...

...Sausage is an effi cient form of butchery...