Taking Babstock:

Katherine: One reviewer of Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht writes, "His verbal acrobatics are in fine form, and that’s all that matters." Certainly, there’s no contesting the formal strength of Babstock’s third volume; his adept maneuvering of syntactic unit, of stanza, of the structure of the anthology itself does recall a high-wire act, most especially in those moments where he leaps out of the constraints of dense lyricism, and, at the last moment, grabs hold of the rope again. But is that truly all that matters? Is athleticism all that we should require of our poets?

I don’t envy Babstock. The great burden of expectation that reviewers have been laying on him is a heavy trip - our Heaney, our Muldoon, the next Cohen, Auden, Wallace Stevens. Babstock is the perfect poster boy for all those who want to argue that the lyric poem ain’t dead, it’s just pining for the fjords. But I think those hopefuls might be about to lose their champion.

'Cause Babstock’s been reading up on his phenomenology and cognitive science. And the upshot of confronting reductive ideas like that of Daniel Dennett is that you start to realize that man is no special shit. Babstock calls it a "Fifties idea," but surely Hamlet came to the same conclusion a few years before that, that "we alone are responsible for our consciousness."

There’s something either really interesting or sort of irritating about a lyric poet expressing sadness about a solipsistic view of the self. I mean, isn’t that a large part of the reason that some of us have been so suspicious of the lyric voice? Because it perpetuates the fiction that the self is unitary, and whole.

That’s why the places in the book where the voice breaks are the most interesting to me - in poems like, "Subject, with Rhyme, Riding a Swell":

I moved like winter wheat.

I from dull wind came up and quiet.

I wanted and not large was there there to entreat.

I went myself to a parkbench to feed whatever would eat.  

I’m curious to see where Babstock ends up as he rides these long, looping, existential swells, a journey mirrored in the formal structure of the most explicitly philosophical meditations, "Essentialist," "Pragmatist," "Materialist," "Verificationist," "Compatabilist." Will his lyricism unravel even further? How long can you hold on to a form if its basic tenet no longer holds?

Obviously, there’s more to this work than formal skill. But the ideas that this skill renders so beautifully are ones that I don’t trust, and this is just a philosophical difference here. The distance from the subject that skepticism demands, the cool air and cold stream of consciousness, the condition of Ataraxia - a zen-like neutral state which represents the ideal place from which to contemplate an object - this runs counter not only to my temperament but to how I am thinking about thinking these days.

Alex Good: You don't envy Babstock? As a follicly challenged guy, I should be envious of that unruly mop of hair he's showing off in his (rather unnerving) author photo. But I've learned to accept and adjust.

I do envy his talent. There were a number of poems in this book that really pulled me up short. "Palindromic," "A Brochure," "Subject, with Rhyme, Riding a Swell," "Ataraxia," and "The World's Hub," were all highlights for me. I had to read them several times, not because they were particularly difficult (though some of them were), but just in admiration of their control of effect. "A Brochure," for example, starts off with a strict stanza relating the straitened conditions of the here-and-now:

Then the belt of penury tightened further
and whether from hunger
or a need to lash back,
we started dreaming of weeks of slack;

The stanzas that follow all have the same rhyme scheme but when the mental brochure opens the poem gets away from using end-stopped lines. The belt is loosened. As the poet goes tripping through progressively more unreal, less specific destinations the stanzas seem to be completely unwinding, until coming back down to earth with the upside-down house in Oslo. Not really a return, but another kind of transportation, to one of Auden's "altogether elsewheres" of the imagination.

That Babstock, when he's good, is so very, very good made me wonder a bit why it is that the best poets can be so uneven. I guess because they take chances. Sometimes these work, other times they don't. I don't know why anyone would want to launch a book of poetry with the image of a subway train as a "civic worm." That's terrible. As a formal experiment I thought "Subject, with Rhyme, Riding a Swell" succeeded brilliantly. I don't much care for found poetry, but "The Sickness Unto  Death, and Harris on the Pig. Found" was as good as that stuff gets. "Tarantella" - in which every line is a rhyme or near-rhyme with the title - was a wild mis-fire, reminiscent of that Simpsons episode where they do that musical version of Streetcar Named Desire ("Stelllaaaa! Stelllaaaa! Can't you hear me yella? You're puttin' me through Hella!"). 

Maybe he was thinking of that too. I don't know. There's a lot of playfulness here, and I also think quite a bit of leg-pulling. I mean, what are we to make of an endnote directing us to one of Emerson's essays . . . as found on emersoncentral.com? Is that really where he read it? And did either of you understand the opening poem about the Billy Bee jar? Something to do with phenomenology, but what? A contemporary riff on Yeats and Pound (Yeats's question about whether every modern nation is half dead at the top, picked up by Pound in the Cantos)? I didn't get much out of it at all. Then again, I'll confess I don't know who Daniel Dennett is.

At the end of the day I wasn't sure there was a coherent theory of knowledge and consciousness being presented here. Perhaps because he's a poet and not a philosopher. What I mean by that is that the poet never affirmeth, in part because the tools of his trade are images. A Billy Bee jar isn't a theory of the mind, and an Airstream Land Yacht is only "sort of like a brain." These images are meant to be suggestive, but I don't see them as declaring anything really groundbreaking. Take the end of "Airstream Land Yacht":

She's sort of like a model brain, no?
     Just sits there unless towed.
And a constant need to unload, to forego,
     What we couldn't take or 
          know.

What you're left with is the image, one that teases us out of thought (the inviting "no?"), but not one that insists on any kind of point. After all, on the face of it the point is as banal as "beauty is truth, truth beauty." The same goes for another poem I really liked, "Expiry Date." The end of this poem seems more assertive: "It's what we think we saw that sticks, never what we see." But again I think it is the image of "Ouija" (words are images in this poem, things seen on signs, appearing in dictionaries, etc.) that opens out to speculation. You can't argue with what is being said (and again, on its own it's not very deep). The verb "sticks" takes its meaning from that context - the tenacity of the after-image, the deceptiveness of the purely visual, the connotations of sexual fluids that the lewdness of the poet's eye that has been building up to. Such words are only images of what we think we see and what we want them to mean, not some kind of pseudo-scientific discourse.

Though uneven, I did think this was a very strong book. There's a technical accomplishment and intellectual ambitiousness to it that I really responded to. This year's list is off to a good start!

Katherine: Hmmm.
 
Well, I think that the poet affirmeth plenty, including Sir Philip Sidney, who was also known to lieth a fair bit and take great pleasure in doing so. And I'll grant that to present an idea through an image may open the interpretation of that idea to more diverse readings and may even allow for a more ambiguous rendering of a concept, but surely, at the end of the day, one wants to at least suggest an idea through the images? Otherwise, well, why bother writing anything at all?
 
The opening poem is the lens through which I read the rest of the volume - ignoring the strange advice of the blurb to choose instead the love poems as the "key to unlock" the collection. I thought the poem's placement suggested its importance, so I spent some time figuring out just what the heck an epoché is ­ yes, it's a concept from phenomenology, and a quick Wikipedia search reveals that it's connected to a state of mind phenomenologists call "ataraxia," the title of another poem in the work. So, though I ended up feeling like a bear of very little brain indeed as I wrestled, it seemed to be important. And of course "theory of mind" alludes to models of consciousness as well. All of these concepts point to a kind of self-imposed separation of self from the rest of the world in order to see it clearly. This brand of phenomenology has its roots in skepticism. And Babstock returns to this idea of the isolated individual consciousness throughout the book - heads in this book are everywhere severed.
 
And yet clearly, the humour of the opening poem invites us to see an absurdity in this state of consciousness, where seeing depends on the emptying of the head, where in order to understand what's out there, what "seems to be," you have to be willing to suspend your belief in it. If you've achieved that level of consciousness, then you've reached the state of ataraxia, oddly zen-like, which I understand to be the land of milk and honey of the poem, a poem that recalls Dickinson for me. We revisit that sense of absurdity in "Expiry Date" - "this oughta be fun," and again, I feel Babstock alternating in his response to these ideas between lament and reckless embrace. At the end of the book, I think he's still teetering.
 
Yes, "Tarantella" made me think of that Simpsons episode too- I think they're very similar gestures! And both delightful (that is one of my favourite episodes). The Musical Comedy and the fella in the poem both take themselves wayyyyy too seriously. "Spare me the blad and blah" indeed! Maybe I've just been woo'd by one too many self-serious Costello framed boys . . .
 
And at the risk of seeming completely contrarian, I liked the "civic worm."

Alex Good: But a subway train just isn't like a worm. I mean, I suppose it's underground most of the time. But really. I think it's a lousy image.

The poet representeth. For example, he representeth the balanced state of epoché in the half-empty head of the Billy Bee jar. I'm just not sure what the point is. And I'm not trying to be thick. I'm honestly not very good at this stuff. 

Alex Boyd: This has been a difficult one for me to write about, because I recognize that Babstock is talented, and he's written poems I've loved. His attention to detail is remarkable, just that ability for sharp poetic images. Even the first poem in this collection felt to me as though it had enough detail for a short story, a soldier described as having "A helmet dangled on his back, a hillock / in spring, sprouting a version of verdant grasses." Or elsewhere "The black polyps of bin bags." It's as though Babstock looks around with photographic, poetic memory, taking in images like a whale taking in plankton, even a bit stuck on certain details so that he repeats them, a glove compartment described as "Little bulb, little bulb, over wet naps / and manuals." Or in a different poem "Generator. / Generator."

And I recognize these are carefully crafted. But I found them frustrating and unsatisfying, for feeling crafted from whatever was scooped up, without the poems really getting off the ground in terms of something important. "Pragmatist" ends with the line "There's a kind of shroud I pull across my life," which struck me as a much better first line. As a last line, itmeans he ends the poem just as he begins to invest it with emotional weight. "Hungerford Note" has a pile of strong images, including "the sea's winey darkness," and a "very amusing man in a waistcoat, doing / amusing things with rubber balls." I loved the final lines "I can hear the trolleys  / biting the bones of the street. If you get this before / the onset of winter, think on it. We were very wrong." But those final lines would be even stronger if they were able to pin down something more concrete from earlier in the poem or spin it in a new direction. It's as though the images were often a pile of pretty beads in a bowl, rather than on a string. I felt like Babstock was in the next room assuming the reader is eavesdropping rather than speaking to the reader. Maybe that's the point. Or maybe the point is that we "only seem," and flash through a disconnected existence before we're gone. But it would have made more sense to me to write a few poems to reflect this rather than most of a poetry book. And at 108 pages it clocks in as fairly long, for a poetry book.

Alex Good: But Alex! He's giving you more for your money! No flimsy chapbook this!

I get the impression I liked this one more than you folks. I'm very interested now to see how the rest of the list plays out.

NEXT: Taking a ride with Bachinsky