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FORTY YEARS OF AMERICAN POETRY IN ONE SHORT BOOK reviewed by Greg Kuzma Duane Ackerson/ BLINDED BY THE LIGHT/THEN THE DARK; Ravenna Press,2011; ISBN:978-0-9835982-4-4 Nearly every poem in Ackerson's book is a fresh start at finding stability amidst not only the chaos of daily experience but also the hallucinations that are innate within language and its links or failed connections to what language presumably names or explains. In "Mechanized Farming," a prose paragraph, Ackerson begins with a seemingly innocuous and even dull subject and then reveals the absurdities within it or within its reach. No one can tell me mechanized farming isn't The poem pushes its conceit to its limit and beyond. In the next poem "Pavanne for a Dead Mirror" Ackerson's playful seeing extends beyond mere tricks and jokes to "the beauty of poetry." The first stanza sets the scene: The glass of the mirror comes apart, Shortly thereafter, after some typical Ackersonian digressions the poet reaches to embrace the innate beauty implicit in the event: You pick up the pieces of glass, Between the mundane event and the transcendent vision Ackerson's mind flits and flirts, then to flare up into the unforgettable image. Back in the sixties and seventies, when I first encountered Ackerson's work, he and I were students of each and every poetry craze that came along. We read the new rampage of "little mags" religiously. If so and so and so and so were writing prose poems, Duane and I were writing prose poems. (We even published a "prose-poem anthology" together.) Then came "one-line poems," then a variation on this form where the poem was one-line in length but the title was like an elaborate footnote turned on its head, presenting everything you might want to know about the context in which the one-line was presenting itself-the "who what when where why and how" to which the poem was then the punch line or the unforeseen tangent. Traces of these influences linger and echo throughout this book, which is in fact a "selected poems" spanning 40 years of more. For instance, "Mushrooms" might well be a one-line poem if one drops the present title and uses the first line as the title: White Heads Lift Out of the Soil and then the poem's present second line would become the one-line poem: Am I so near the graveyard? I have only a vague recollection of this crazy time, but arranged as it is above "Mushrooms" may well hearken back to that special subset of "one-line poems" invented I believe by the editor of HEARSE- where the poem's title is always a statement and the poem always a question working in juxtaposition. The intended ambition of all these what were then "new approaches" was to avoid the usual poetic forms and clichés,(what the "new formalists" might look back to fondly as that "damned plain good hard work of rhyme and meter"!) And then to keep re-inventing ourselves, so as not to become complacent, even as we were behaving like a flock of geese. It was a happy time because it was so companionable, and fueled by gossip-each new variation by some friend of ours threatened to overturn the whole enterprise, taking us in what might be a new direction, that might then disclose other new possibilities, or exhaust itself and require a whole new program of leadership and direction-and WHO THEN might become THE NEW LEADER!? It was sort of what Hollywood is accused of doing today. A film comes out that makes a big opening weekend, and within a year six other films which are almost carbon copies of the successful one try to follow up on its success. Sometimes they are failures, but now and then one far exceeds in daring what the first one did, and then goes on seemingly to define the form and hold its own in the ongoing continuum of cinematic invention. (At least for a while!) "Snow" is another remnant from these lost years: Sometimes, while trying Ackerson's playful innocence, which is often illogical, and then ironic, then becomes surreal, or also accidental or incidental, written as if in a hurry, a sudden glimpse past the ordinary, glimpsed in an intense moment and insight and scribbled on a matchbook cover (Oh, yes, everybody smoked in those days too!). Let me run through a complete slightly-longer poem and remark on some of its instances. Cement Birds in the Birdbath They cannot fly south for the winter. So how does this poem undermine the tradition but keep us surprised throughout? All old dull boring poets write about either actual birds or ethereal birds. But not until Ackerson do we come down to the all-but-forgotten cement bird in the cement bird bath, heretofore neglected, right?-- but real art (if cement art is art?), the art of the mundane world the truly starving truest poet lives in. This is THE REAL WORLD, and Ackerson is going to show us how much life resides within it, without the blandishments of poetical language. Naturally they cannot fly south-because they cannot fly at all-but naturally they do not need to fly south, because they are already frozen in cement, which is as cold as ice. Even were the weather report 100 degrees! So they defy natural instincts, and so become a kind of eternal bird, or artistic commentary which discloses aspects of what birds are and are not, and one that troubles us because so much of it seems "unnatural." Some funny twists here in that only a cement bird would think about (without fear) "nesting in a cat's mouth." Ackerson reverses the implied "hatching" of nesting with the "catching" the cats do, when in the second stanza these very superior birds beyond our reach of definition "catch" their reflections "dancing among live sparrows." But what lies within the province of cement birds, or in what ways can we learn about real birds by looking at cement birds? These questions linger over the poem, nor are they answered by it. This is Ackerson's poetic world, filled with jokes and dead ends and things unlikely ever to make full sense-it is a unique realm that lies between the poetry most of us write and read and the world most of us live in. It makes concessions to each, but it also insists on its own rules and laws. So the mind is teased and taunted. Probably the only right response to a poem like this is to be stimulated by it to write one's own poem in all the freedoms we can lay claim to-having been given them through Ackerson's example. Hence "the surreal" generates itself. Another all-the-rage-poem from the seventies was the "thing poem." Robert Bly dragged in the tree stump and roots into our classroom and asked us to try to see it without poetic distortions or the usual gestures, distractions, abstractions, misconceptions, or metaphoric distortions, but to see it "as it is." I was the first one to speak up that day and read my lines only to have Bly show me in all the ways my responses were poetic and predictable. Ackerson must have gone through this sort of training somewhere, and shows me that like me he only half understands how to achieve Bly's expectations. Umbrella I push a button, Bly, were he to comment here, might well see this as another failed "thing" poem or failed "object" poem. But as with every fad of our poetry any format or template is merely a starting point, and here, as we see, however Ackerson's poem might have begun with some program in his mind it shortly becomes "a Ted Kooser poem" of resplendent and enterprising metaphors. Did Kooser acknowledge the poem as homage at the time? Duane Ackerson sees his work as a "poetry of speculation." Such poems continually gravitate to a "what if" equilibrium, not unlike what Kenneth Koch was working towards in WISHES, LIES, AND DREAMS. Here's some later lines from "The Wind": The wind takes the marks of hammers from Personification is the base line in nearly all of Ackerson's work. Personification pervades to such degree that in this book of his we find no actual problematical breathing living joyous or disappointing people. There are no portraits or elegies or even "personal poems" in this book. It is not a scrapbook or a diary, there are no divorces or betrayals here-poetry is rather the play of inspiration, a sort of calisthenics or exercise program to distract us from the dire rules and laws and facts in which the debilitating damages of our lives play out. These are poems that rise or fall on wit alone: (from "The Books: Selected Editions") The book of raindrops Ackerson's goal is pure fun. I can imagine someone trying to interrupt the poet with a large credit card bill or news of some horrific tragedy, and have him reply, in all earnestness, "Hey, give me a break, I'm writing a poem." Greg Kuzma  |