An analysis of another specimen from the Neo York School of Poetry today:

Bardo

by Peter Gizzi    I've spent my life  in a lone mechanical whine,    this combustion far off.    How fathomless to be  embedded in glacial ice,    what piece of self hiding there.    I am not sure about meaning  but understand the wave.    No more Novalis out loud.    No Juan de la Cruz singing  "I do not die to die."    No solstice, midhaven, midi, nor twilight.    No isn't it amazing, no  none of that.    To crow, to crown, to cry, to crumble.    The trees the air warms into  a bright something    a bluish nothing into    clicks and pops  bursts and percussive runs.    I come with my asymmetries,  my untutored imagination.    Heathenish,    my homespun vision  sponsored by the winter sky.    Then someone said nether,  someone whirr.    And if I say the words  will you know them?    Is there world?  Are they still calling it that?

I laughed when I read in his Wikipoo entry that Peter Gizzi had won the Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Younger Poets Award and found he’d been selected for it by John Ashbery.  That’s because his Bardo instantly reminded me of Ashbery, even though I consider my acquaintance with Ashbery’s poems minimal.  I guess I’ve unconsciously become almost an expert in what an Ashbery poem is, though, because of all the poets now around 50 who specialize in it: as this poem nicely demonstrates, it playfully jump-cuts from one subject to another, without breaking syntactical decorum–it simply fails often to complete thoughts, acting like normal conversation in the mode of the New York Poets.  It is thus not a kind of language poem.  I suppose its intent is to create a mood.  An enveloping mood of “what’s going on?” which is quite pleasant because of the melodic effectiveness of the words chosen, the visual effectiveness of the visual images verbalized, and the interestingly almost surrealistic word-combinations.  It generally has just enough high-culture references, like the ones to Novalis and Juan de la Cruz, to give its readers a sense of superiority for picking them up—but, to be fair, to help with the mood when effective, like Eliot’s reference to Tiresias in “The Waste Land.”

This mood of “what’s going on?” or of being on verge of learning something fascinating which is never revealed, seems a main pleasure of these kinds of poems that I belittle perhaps because I want eventually to learn the answer.  I think many who enjoy such poems forget the question before its unansweredness becomes frustrating.  Perhaps most of them are used to unanswered situations.  I have to admit that I feel defective as a critic in dealing with this.  I can only hope that eventually I’ll somehow come up with better grapplings with it.

Ah, one may be that those liking this kind of poetry most like it because the clues to what’s going on are enough for them to missolve the question into something making them happy.  That is, the poem’s details will direct this sort of reader to some solution because he isn’t fussy about rationality.

Okay, I’m ready now to do a close reading, as a student much more than as an expert:

Bardo

The title is probably important.  It suggests little to me: a mixture of poet-priest and Italian thug?

Gah, I hate to admit it, but Wikipoo helped me out on this:

Wiki: “The Tibetan word bardo means literally “intermediate state” – also translated as “transitional state” or “in-between state” or “liminal state.”

My condensation of a Wiki paragraph: Loose meaning: in between two incarnations . . . experiencing weird things (and I think of T. S. Eliot when he wrote the first draft of “The Wasteland”) . . . .

Wiki: “The term bardo can also be used metaphorically to describe times when our usual way of life becomes suspended, as, for example, during a period of illness or during a meditation retreat. Such times can prove fruitful for spiritual progress because external constraints diminish. However, they can also present challenges because our less skillful impulses may come to the foreground.” In short, his title gives the poet permission to ignore rationality.

I’ve spent my life
in a lone mechanical whine,

Vivid image almost surely of a meaningless life, like some kind of whining factory machine’s, or a factory worker conveyered through life by the whine of the machinery of the place where he works—without companionship

this combustion far off.

A jump-cut here from conventional poetic suggestiveness to something insufficiently explained that a reader—an experienced reader of this sort of thing—will let drift aboard.  In any case, we don’t know what this far-off combustion is.

How fathomless to be
embedded in glacial ice,

Another jump-cut, to something almost silly-and making no sense in context.  The speaker is outside spatial measure as he will later become outside time.

what piece of self hiding there.

I am not sure about meaning
but understand the wave.

The speaker of the poem confesses his inability to understand what’s going on, which will reassure the reader that he’s not a flawed reader for his like inability.  I take understanding the wave as a feeling of causeless contentment—due to perhaps the rightness of, say, the incomprehensible God’s being in his heaven. Note, though, how easy it should be to connect “the wave” to almost anything.  Making the poem a playground with no final pay-off for its engagent being an important purpose for many contemporary poets.  Not I.  I want a playground and hope whatever game is played in it will take a maximal time to provide a pay-off, but will provide a pay-off.  Which I equate with an engagent’s recognition of the poem’s unifying principle.

No more Novalis out loud.

I know too little about Novalis to say much about this except that . . .

No Juan de la Cruz singing
“I do not die to die.”

. . . except that, coupled with St. John of the Cross (about whom I also know very little), the speaker is announcing a break with religious mysticism.  Maybe not due to his rising above them, but because of his failure to assimilate them.

No solstice, midhaven, midi, nor twilight.

Here his break is with . . . the heavens?  (I don’t know whether “midhaven” is a typo for “midheaven” or not, nor what real difference it makes whether it is or not.)  The middle of things—as a midi is a skirt that’s halfway between the knees and the ankles.  I can’t figure out what “midi” is otherwise doing here, as it has to do with synthesizer or computer music, I learned.

No isn’t it amazing, no
none of that.

The speaker now wants to be down-to-earth?  No mysticism?

To crow, to crown, to cry, to crumble.

Here may be a principle unifying this poem, but it’s too weak for me—it’s the evocation of a highly sensitive soul’s mystical dislocation (or attainment of bardo).  That allows for uninhibited enjoyment of a wide range of greatnesses and diminutions—from crowing up to crowning, and from crying down to crumbling.  Bardo, for sure.  I love the alliterations, by the way.  And the parallelisms.  Extended but effective.

The trees the air warms into
a bright something

a bluish nothing into

clicks and pops
bursts and percussive runs.

Here a sort of pay-off out of James Wright or Theodore Roethke.  The trees are “warmed” into something undefinable but lovely, a “bluish nothing” turned into “clicks and pops/ bursts and percussive runs” (to connect every so slightly with “midi”—to no advantage that I can find).

I come with my asymmetries,
my untutored imagination.

Heathenish,

my homespun vision
sponsored by the winter sky.

(I particularly like the phrasing of “sponsored by the winter sky,” the way it particularizes the homespun nature of his vision.)

Then someone said nether,
someone whirr.

And if I say the words
will you know them?

Is there world?
Are they still calling it that?

In the poem’s finale, the narrative holds firm—no real non sequiturs.  The speaker has come to the peak of his experience with many flaws and commonnesses.  There someone (a Novalis or St. John?) said magic words, or words magic for him but not necessarily for whomever the speaker is now speaking to, “nether” and “whirr.”  Something better than a “mechanical whine.”  Something getting him to “the combustion far off?”  Can this text have been about a listening experience, a discovery of wonderful music after a life of whining music?  I doubt it, but perhaps music is the nether of the experience that transports the speaker beyond our world—and beyond time.

This is clearly a poem requiring more than one critical inquiry.  I feel I’ve made a good start at working it out, but far from a complete one.

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