My favorite of the poems in Geoffrey Young’s latest self-published chapbook is called “Out of the White.” Like most of his work in recent years, and everything in Habit, the new chapbook, it’s a fourteen-liner—a sonnet or not as you please. (I like writing poems of that length as well, though his are strictly tailored to the English style, 4-4-4-2, while mine tend to have a Petrarchan cut, 4-4-3-3; in any case, I like to think of them as nonnets.) “Out of the White” is a sort of ars poetica for four hands, a telephonic dialogue between Young and John Godfrey. Or is dialogue exactly the right term? Young is a much more talkative guy than Godfrey; he’s got the gift of the gab, and—not unlike Samuel Taylor Coleridge—sounds just as inspired when complaining of lack of inspiration as at any other time. “I asked,” writes Young,
if there was a way
to write a poem that wouldn’t collapse
with the first word, if some strategy
of literary posturing might trick
the muse into yielding a vision of anything
—even shadows on snow—a surge
of syllables in contact with emotion,
the poem coughing up some clues
to be studied later.
Is the problem not knowing how to work the trick, or the fear that it’s just a trick? It could be disabling, that feeling that whatever formal procedure might conduce to a rhythmic contact with feeling, a musicality that is somehow also connected to vision, to the image, must be a strategy, a posture, a trick: what Sianne Ngai calls a gimmick. But operating by stratagem could be the poet’s sole chance, for the muse, we gather, is not unwilling to be tricked. And the poet, if a charlatan, is one whose hocus-pocus must work first of all on him- or herself (the muse, after all, being an internal Other). If it seems to work you can study the traces, see if the magic is replicable after the fact. But is that the real story? Maybe not. The poem continues, and concludes with Godfrey’s response, “drawing a bead on my palaver,” Young admits, “with this / shot: ‘If you’re a real poet, you’ll write poems.’” So simple, so airily indifferent to pretense, to the histrionics of the gimmick—although maybe more connected to the poet-as-histrio than it seems, for Godfrey’s retort somehow echoes what Laurence Olivier is supposed to have said to Dustin Hoffman while they were filming John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man in 1976. Hoffman, a method actor, had stayed awake all night in order to appear tired for a scene; Olivier thought there was a better way: “Why not try acting, dear boy?” Sure, but how do you do that? For Hoffman, reality was the best artifice. For Olivier, it seems, artifice came naturally. Acting was something he could just do, as poetry is something Godfrey can do. But what about Young? I don’t picture him losing sleep—a soft version of the programmatic dérèglement de tous les sens—over his attempts to put his syllables in touch with emotion any more than his impatient interlocutor. The beauty of it is that even the worry that the poem might “collapse / / with the first word”—a neurotic anxiety, since it probably takes at least two words to make a collapse—can flow in poetic lines. The poem’s final rejoinder, though attributed to Godfrey (and it certainly has Godfrey’s tone) snaps Young back to himself, and the poem’s sinuous path through its own quandary ends on an abrupt self-illumination. And the illumination of the ordinary is a constant in Young’s poetry. “Art is art, / life is life,” and its gap between the two that allows some light to enter. Or it’s like sex, “that something / Minute & immense, the gift from far away” that happens right here where we are.
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Geoffrey Young, Habit, is published by Airborne, Great Barrington, MA, 2021.
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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.