Like Roger Reeves’s King Me and Frederick Seidel’s Final Solutions, both debut collections, as far as titles go The Complete Stories is humorously audacious. In the jacket photograph, Noah Warren continues to channel all the insouciance of a tougher, blond Thom Yorke, keeping with the breathy smolder that, in YouTube videos or an East Village bar, accompanies his poems’ recitation. They’re ventilated enough as is, expanding and contracting—or collapsing—between skinny columns and cinderblocks of text that might as well be prose but aren’t. Notwithstanding its attempts to shed biographical light and clue us to the painful anagnorises that can give rise to a whole career, The Destroyer in the Glass, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize, was too unsure of itself, too hesitant, to be a page-turner. Stories achieves a tighter braid of I-character and verbal ingenuity, as opposed to the common situation in which tedious bunches of noun phrases merely serve to carry the lifeless writer on a bier of words.
Midway through these linguistic thickets, you wish the poet would lay off the boozy charm for a minute.
A thin road holds the cooling eye.
At the atom’s center fizzes permanent exchange.
Sweating as I slept, guzzled like a wineskin,
I woke to doze in that drowned Asklepieion.
Birds crumbled dawn. Water snakes
crept over the swamp like a script. I dreamed forever.
Warren’s—verbal as much as bodily—slouch may be affected, but no more so than that steel engraving of Whitman at thirty-seven, hat askance with one hand defiantly against his beltless hip. This music is all honey and salt (to risk an allusion to Rupi Kauer), a sort of lyric talking that eschews both cubist obscurity and the flattering inanity of an open mic. His poetry has a baseline of accessibility that nonetheless manages, infrequently and seemingly on whim, to a throw the reader a koan (“There is a large walnut table, bowed / beneath the fiction of steaming food. / And there is a pale disk on the floor / where a lamp stood, that we step around.” [“Cup of Snow”]). If this style isn’t the literal toil offered by Geoffrey Hill or the witty, Grecian difficulties of Ange Mlinko, neither should it be classed with today’s confessionalists, who turn their gazes heavenward and admit to trivialities found in every heart.
At its least artful, when the manner becomes a tad hypnotized by its own song-of-myself, you could almost mistake Warren for one of Instagram’s weepy hashtaggers, with their misty-eyed appreciations of some lover or the tragedy of every cigarette.
You slit on me
a cut you called hot,
its warmth trickling,
your tongue extended,
lapping, your back arched
like a little dog, I said—
you stopped.
Indeed, quite as the soul of blog culture adhered in Karl Ove Knausgård’s autobiographical novels, like Odysseus clinging beneath the sheep of Polyphemus, schmaltzy internet poetry shares genes with that trope of the writer as battered romantic. If at times Warren can be needlessly peacockish, too much a twenty-first-century James Schuyler by way of James Dean, as likely to be awed by a caress as the sight of glaciers (how touching the cover photograph, taken by the poet’s father), his model is Louise Glück, above all her icy spareness and clipped mode of introspection. The acknowledgments for Destroyer confirmed this, and the poems themselves occasionally staged a bit of ventriloquism in homage:
Didn’t I watch
children shuffle strictly in line, cradle
candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers,
chanting Latin—just to fashion Sevilla’s East? Wasn’t I sad?
Didn’t I use to
go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage
raising
bursting violent spears?
Compare Glück’s, “Is it winter again, is it cold again, / didn’t Frank just slip on the ice, / didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted” (“October,” from Averno). So an author’s wool begins stained, like Auden’s titular hand, and fades with age. As with handed-down clothing, influence is meant to be outgrown.
Poetry has always been a medium for selfies built out of letters, that cocksure thinking—aloud or as though privately (“Who can imagine [Mozart’s] “Dove sono” heard?” asked John Stuart Mill. “We imagine it overheard”)—about oneself and the self's world, what Warren referred to in Destroyer as “the little, grandiloquent myths / I nurtured” (“On the Levee”) and which is nearly Mlinko’s, “You know I nurse a certain myth / about myself” (“Epic,” from Distant Mandate). Like its older sibling, this book is most interested of all in the optics of questioning, of looking the dreamiest dreamer; Warren’s trick, such that he seldom appears the very incarnation of Narcissus, is to offset the vanity inherent in those myths with an overlay of shyness. Or it’s a background of melancholy and doubt, except not irreparably so. The “destroyer” alluded to in The Destroyer in the Glass, beyond the suggestion of a man fighting his likeness, refers variously to a warship, possibly a trireme of classical Rome, and a tankard on the Mississippi, “[f]lanked by tugs and a pilot boat” (“On the Levee”). Buried in this may be an unconscious nod to J.M.W. Turner’s painting, The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838. Implicit, then, in the half-decade gulf that divides these collections is the symbolism of a once-ailing ship now leaving the breakers’ yard intact and rigged to sail.
While that freshman effort began with a totemic pelican and ended in drug-induced apotheosis, Stories is altogether the better literature, particularly with respect to the ambition of its imagery (“most appear // to drink at the edge of the gel / until they fall still, and tilt / stiffly into the reservoir, / dissolving into commas” [“Ants Swarming Bait”]) and Warren’s skill at knitting together alliterative half lines (“In the lull after mussels, their oily shells / quiet as broken jaws, you’ll roll / the stem of your glass between three fingers / so its foot wanders the cloth” [“Gina”]) that are sonically nuanced while keeping an eye on the metonymy. This lurching toward stanzaic density is much welcome after the abrupt and clotted breakages of Destroyer, where oftentimes exceedingly little was shot through with em dashes and left autopsied on the page. Still to be found are the random acts of italicization; the wincing, Rilke-esque meditations (e.g., on a bowl of Cheerios, on persimmons); the syntax that, echoing the distractedness of finding oneself thirty-something in America, is wont to restart on a conjunction dragged in from the last sentence or begin mid-clause; and the commentary on masculinity lost and found (“Look what you’ve done, / it’s your bed, said my mother // to my father, who was trying to get up / off the floor, reeking of Listerine” [“Wall Mice”]) that—affectingly, in the scenes drawn from Warren’s recollections of his family—ties the fragility of boyhood to the thornier philosophies of freedom and sexual maturity. There was an awful lot of anonymous straddling in those earlier poems.
Warren’s language is far subtler here, submitting what’s felt to varying degrees of linguistic torque, and directed at subjects worth the thought. The Complete Stories’ professed debts are significantly longer, too, being swelled with thanks for mentors and friends as well as unwitting muses. It is the typical deflection, where a heaping of plaudits seems to deserve a greater show of modesty—and vice versa. Among this rollcall is Henri Cole, one of American poetry’s solitaries; as his work has hinted for decades, with its abashed intelligence, the sign that hangs above Cole’s big heart is likely a version of Frei aber einsam, the cherished motto of the Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim. But for the cooler-than-thou glue that binds these poems together, the tendency to leave a stanza knowingly cologned with nonchalance, it might also be Warren’s.
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Erick Verran’s writing is forthcoming or appears in the Harvard Review, The Drift, the Georgia Review, the Cortland Review, Subtropics, MQR Online, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.