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This shifts into a momentary third stage. A particular instance of this apparent futility ("My friend Luther, six five/who once bragged to me/of fucking his Sunday/School teacher") focuses itself into a sort of revelation about all instances. "O what changes/I've been thru/I say to myself/ since this all began." Things are moving, in other words: the voices, the personality, the words themselves, the book. The tourist, at a low point, reassures himself that the journey is worth it. Then: "yet he [Luther] throws/a shadow over me." The next stage follows immediately in "A storm in December," whose imagery and voice contrast that of "My friend Luther." We travel through some intense introspective moments and come out at "A Sentimental Journey," where subway and flower imagery become a tangle of questioning diction. The later part of these poems' travels has begun: ... why should loss become found why flowers appear? did wish, whatever else this poem for to isolate how such things spring out & say if only to myself tonight I also spent hours here For two more poems we make our way through direct treatment of the voice in intensely personal, habitual imagery. The language becomes the personality, or the personality becomes the language, and one or the other of them takes apart the other. At "Transcendental," another shift occurs. We expand the minute particulars of the personal into the large and disheartening particulars of the general culture. The pictures are not pretty, and the sensibility, as it emerges both for us and for the narrative voice, is summed up in titles - "Gross National Product," "Implicit Functions," "History Lesson" - and in the last few lines from "The Mirror of Metaphor," maybe the most telling in the whole book: I now grow still inside like a swamp where mosquitoes breed recline as smoothly to bed as that wheeling wave to the beach into sheets clean-swept as a laboratory towards dreams which generate such stuff as we're made of like Hiroshima germ warfare We feel, somehow, that the voice has subsumed or assimilated the culture, and the product is gross, or worse. The last poem, "The Old Ways," shows us a more hopeful culture, the Sioux, who of course have been all but exterminated during the modern ethos of European disease, photography, Hiroshima and Previous page Next page Contraband: A Recollection Reading Forays home The Mind Errant |
"Figure & Ground." An instructive, street-teacher voice: "money/talks loudest/& in the finest clothes." And also what seems patently like the author's own voice: "I like my flowers/on a stem." To name only a few. Find your own. Using sharp, Williams-like imagery, words spin together like tiny solar systems and generate linguistic motions which are actual voices and personalities. The voices are a sort of embodiment of the words whirling up in us, and they coalesce in precision moments (like a memory of teenage boys skipping school), in biographical scenes and generalities, and in comments both oblique and direct on the individual's relationship with the culture, which is not so pretty. The personality moves and changes, experiences sublime scenery and inner anguish across a series of transformations, which is, of course, a basic implication of the title: a conscious tourist changes as he (or she) goes. The particular irony of the word "tourist" in this context lies in the fact that a tourist is always an observer (cf. the title of an earlier book, Observations), feels always separate or detached from his or her place. And in fact, a voice of sometimes anguished alienation surfaces in these poems. It's part of the culture, and part of the personality. There are roughly six obvious transformatons, or stages, in the book. The opening lines urge us to remember previous poetic journeys: Once I was sinister at all costs: It was crows black cats, lizards birds of prey Give us each day our weapons & a battle plan This reminds us that the speaker and the poems, too, have a history: these images recall Total Eclipse, Holsapple's second book, published in 1977. On the next page we get blunt references to Shelley and Wordsworth, and a haunted sense of a poetic ancestry and personal past. With the past established, we travel in the early poems through vibrant imagery, almost objectivist: the teenage boys, flowers on stems, small boys playing baseball, first snow, old ladies, and a couple of almost sappy love poems. Despite what the common reader might take to be a more recent lineage of recondite writing (Bernstein's, etc.), anyone can read these early poems with real enjoyment because the imagery is so sharp and clear, the language so direct and taut, careful. A second stage begins at the eleventh poem (this book is unpaginated), "Conversions," where the opening lines signal a shift in mood and subject: "When someone drowns/unwanted kittens, or slaughters/the family pig, it always sends/an involuntary shudder/thru me." This is a transformation of one of the early voices from exhilaration to antipathy. He loves growing flowers, but is also "predatory." The next poem in this stage is "Tourist," also not pretty. The personal voice recalls seeing two bosses "corner & ridicule/a dumb or disabled employee--/purely for sport". We learn: "the mind seizes/on such instances/as vistas into the world." This is instruction for reading: the ebullient imagery of the first set of poems and this darker imagery of the second set are similar, in a Baudelairean way, because they are part of a single context. The mind seizes on instances, all instances, and gives them contexts. In the next poem, "Sacred Shroud," the instance revolves around a tabloid ad offering replicas of the Holy Shroud and generates a sense of general futility and emptiness, in contrast to the fullness in the images of boys, old ladies, first snows. |
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