Taking a Pass:

Alex Boyd: I'm willing to believe John Pass means well, but this is the sort of work that ultimately supports the idea that poetry is pretty and trite. Self-censorship is important in a poet, but Pass allows banal, conversational lines like "I remember thinking A pullover is just right for a day like this," or "Rockabilly this afternoon, then maybe a little opera." Near the beginning of the book, it's a thirteen page poem on things like sleepy bees and sunclustered St John’s Wort, but with digressions into how he wishes his briefcase had a more impressive sounding snap, and at one point, how it felt to unclog his toilet: "the metal snake balked, twisted back on itself, grinding porcelain and the baking soda and vinegar fizz was unconvincing and the hot water blast from the host stuck in there / flushed back nothing. But somehow / it gets cleared, goes clear, flushes!"

This is particularly frustrating for me, because I'm actually someone who resents the assumption that anything positive is naïve and a waste of time. It's so hip in our culture to be irreverent and sassy, even as we face immense problems. And I think if these poems were successful, they’d be putting a new spin on the everyday, encouraging a new appreciation. But Pass is too self-indulgent, too clumsy when it comes to trying to blend his images and ideas, and they're too heavily weighed down with eye-rolling stuff like "Oh world. Where are you?" Other details are vaguely touched on and left behind, like a "magnetic, compelling shagginess." Maybe it was a compelling shagginess that unclogged his toilet. It's as though Pass won't get out of the way of his own poems, awkwardly mixing poetic images with too many details that are personal and obscure, conversational and diary-like. When he wrote about a "grateful face-full / of cunt or sea-air" I wanted to throw the book across the room, which was tricky, because I was in a Starbucks. I found more to appreciate when he's more concise and finds more focus, as in a poem like "New Freeway, 1963." But to be honest, I don’t quite understand how this one was nominated.

Katherine: So.

When this book arrived in the mail, I opened it, glanced at the cover and thought, "hrmm… someone seems to have sent me a book of inspirational verse . . . as a thank you gift, maybe?" And then I recognized the title and author, though I wouldn't have been surprised if instead the author's name had been Jack Handy. I’m a design snob, I admit it. But we do judge books by their covers and this book with its flowers and large font on the back says trite sentimentality before you even crack the spine.

So I tried very hard to put this behind me as I read. But this book’s insides matched its outside. When I looked at the cover, I thought, "Who designed this thing?" When I read the contents, I thought, "Who edited this thing?"

Pass seems to share with my high school students the feeling that if you avoid active verbs, you’ll sound deep.

     Plumb
as I will our suspended depths and brilliancies

detail is preponderant, magnificent
wash and splash of specifics, essential
digressions - among the budding fuchias, into

forgotten upper corners
of our living rooms, across the mouths of wine glasses . . . 

And I’m a big fan of word play, and there’s no pun too low for my liking, but if word play is too precious, it comes across as smug:

     Depths of heat and pleasure

and then, as hearth in earth ends, and heart in art . . .

And I nearly hurled the book through space at the same point as you, Alex. But it was the "gulping" of the cunt that inspired an audible "gack!" from me, as I read on the subway. Something very unfortunate about the way sexual content is handled in this work. Again, as you pointed out, a little too self-conscious? Or perhaps self-congratulatory? I started an inventory of "penetration" references at one point.

I'm also fairly well flummoxed by this nomination.

Alex Good: Yes, yes, the cover is brutal. 

And yes, Pass's word play is aggravating. God knows why he can't leave some of these quibbles alone. He knows his "serendipity [and] pun doodle" habit is a vice, but can't seem to stop himself. The results are alarming.

     On the breeze

pine resin, whiff of reed (no whiff of reading), cloud fluff, sulphur
of the black Honda just gone by.

That's really bad. Where does he get the "whiff of reading" from? Is it just stream of consciousness? And even when there is a logical connection, like when he trips over far-fetched, fetching, and affection in the poem "Far-fetched," the effect is to nearly ruin an otherwise very nice poem.

At least he seems aware of some of these deficiencies:

     A critic mentioned
my hesitations. Another deplored that I constantly
undercut my best effects. The snippy ironic cleverness

I wanted no more of
has me by the short and curlies.

But not all. There is, for one thing, the cliché in the "short and curlies." And there is his totally leaden long line. And a tendency to get lost in an obfuscating poetic haze where even grammatical structure dissolves. Honestly, I can't think of a worse way to begin a book than this:

Come into the huge and intractable beauty
of what I thought I knew, dumbfounded

at the lucent breadth
of uninhabited context, immense locality

where self's wisp (just reminded) whispers, oh
the terrible artifice of human thought.

What the hell does any of that mean? It's not like Babstock's "Theory of Mind" proem where I was just left wondering what the point was. Here I have no idea what is being said at all. Nothing is communicated.

However, having said all this I will also say that I thought the book had its moments. Whatever strength Pass has as a poet seems to require a lot of room to develop, so it's his long poems that are the best. "nowrite.doc" and the "Twinned Towers" sequence were the highlights of the book for me. But even here he challenges the reader with a Shelleyan psychadelia of imagery. I actually liked the end of "Twinned Towers" (and thought the poem as a whole to be an intelligent response to 9/11), but I'm not entirely sure what all he's got in there. Or what he's leaving out.

     If not resolution, the long spin

in our deepest thinking of gyre, helix, the messy swirls
of galaxies as they swing back in

toward still-point, starburst, sends loose at best
to some shared influence . . . a magnetic, compelling shagginess
to the back-lit old-growth where the trail winds down.

No, it's not very exact. But I found this "compelling shagginess" of image both beguiling and evocative. Perhaps it's better if you're stoned.

I think I liked the book better than either of you. I didn't mind the gulping at cunt at all. But since I think we've probably ruled this one out anyway maybe we should just move on.

NEXT: Taking some time with Thesen