Given what we’ve lived through over the past four years, paranoia and its kissing cousin, conspiratorial thinking, look even more perilous than ever. With good reason. But are such manias really entirely alien to poetry—a use of language that blurs, multiplies, and elides meaning, that deploys patterns to complicate understanding? Geoffrey O’Brien’s poetry has long been tempted by the urge to discover meanings hidden under meanings, intimations that can seem ominous but might also augur something ecstatic, even “The Assault on Reason by Divine Love”—as the title of one poem in his new book, Who Goes There, would have it. This is a poetry in which, according to another new poem, “Rumor Painted Full of Tongues,”
What looks like a harmless canopy dangling over the entrance to a midtown high rise is so often a signal visible to offshore interlopers who are declaring in so many words that you are incapable of reading what is put in front of you. I didn’t want to be the one to say this but someone has to acknowledge that silence can be deliberately manipulated.
Such meanings are not unlike the person glimpsed in yet another poem, who
could not be approached directly but only by moving out of sight into an unlit underpass and proceeding yet further from the point you wanted to reach along curved paths circling toward a remote inner portal.
At the end of this twisted path lies a certain (seductive) madness, no doubt, but in this poetry its threat is offset by an ever-present care for measure, lucidity of form, and cool clarity of diction that attest to the ironizing power of objectivity—a Don DeLillo libretto set to George Oppen’s music. O’Brien describes “a property in language / to be absconded with and diverted / toward private ends” as if it were the most evident thing, a solid reality, albeit one that is timeless and archetypal. Archetypal and timeless is the spell of words, and yet to be ensorcelled by them happens in time, has a history. This history is the subject of another new book of O’Brien’s, Where Did Poetry Come From. One immediately notices that both titles share this, that they take the form of questions deprived of their question marks—questions made declarative. Asserted is the young mind’s opening to poetry via nursery rhymes, television theme songs, Sunday School psalms, Classics Illustrated comics, and the origins of the poet’s sense that secret meanings are manifest in the impossibility to articulate them: In A Child’s Garden of Verses, “what was hidden was being revealed. A constant opening up. Nobody knew of these things except Robert Louis Stevenson. First named author. Secret voice, intimate presence.” The intimation is that fullness is made of emptiness, “the words”—for example Carroll’s nonsense (or should I say nonce-sense?) coinages like “mimsy” and “uffish”—“being window in what had otherwise been wall. To know a nonsense word was to know for the first time what a word was.” Then, presumably, books found around the house or in the local library reveal the “mechanical marvel” of Omar Khayyām/Edward Fitzgerald’s verse as it makes its “wisdom music”; “an old book with a particularly soft cloth binding,” Conrad Aiken’s anthology Modern American Poets opens “a space made strange by snowfall” in Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”; a shelfful of books on Japan yields “a web of messages in the form of whispered hints.” And more: country ballads that contain “another language making use of the same words as the everyday one. The more simple the words the more completely they say what cannot even be translated. Like a headstone.” The absurd title of an unseen B-movie. An incantation to fog in Bleak House. Blake. Rimbaud. Williams. All told: a meta-poem, a tremendous effort of recall, a question answering itself by declaring itself, a source and a destination.
Addendum: My musings on Geoffrey O'Brien's fascination with conspiratorial thinking were set down before the publication, in the January 14 issue of The New York Review of Books, of an essay on just that subject--a consideration of a book called The Hitler Conspiracies, by Richard J, Evans. It is, as O'Brien says, "a domain full of digressive rabbit holes and feverish flights of free association" but the author's "tone of calm skepticism does not disguise his underlying theme of proliferating peril." Just so.
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Geoffrey O’Brien, Who Goes There, is published by Dos Madres Press, Loveland, Ohio, 2020.
Geoffrey O’Brien, Where Did Poetry Come From: Some Early Encounters, is published by Marsh Hawk Press, East Rockaway, NY, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.