If it Ain't Baroque...Let's Add a Few More Beasts: The Poetry of Amy Gerstler

If I carried Emerson's remark about poetic cannibals to the point of excess in my first post, it is in part a testament to the poetry of Amy Gerstler, whose strange, charming, and fabulous lyrics have been my favorite poetic discovery of the summer. How is it possible not to be intrigued by a poet who opens her book by addressing a prayer to God as the "fire-eating custodian of my soul" and the "author of hermaphrodites, radishes,/ and Arizona's rosy sandstone"? ("Prayer for Jackson" in Medicine) This talent for eclectic inventory is combined with a endless metaphoric energy--giving her poems the feel of flurried improvisations. In reading Gerstler's poems, I am reminded of John Ashbery's early poetry (especially the critically neglected "How Much Longer Shall I Continue to Inhabit the Divine Sepulchre...") for sheer improbable pictoral brilliance and that quality rare in contemporary poems: the ability to inspire a poetic response in the reader that deepens rather than derives from the original.

Perhaps the best example of the pictoral quality of Gerstler's poems can be found in the opening lines of "Song" (from her 1997 volume Crown of Weeds):

Let me assure you my hallucinations

were beautiful. Car windows liquified,

becoming small waterfalls. Prayers rose,

faint as a baby's fragrant breaths,

from a blackberry pie as the knife
pierced its crust. Plants chated

sotto voce about "lasting things."

Drunk businessmen giggled and hit

each other with briefcases.

A bowl of lemons snored adorably.

If, in some poems, Gerstler starts with an improbable proposition that culminates in clever examples, here the line between proposition (hallucinations=beautiful) and evidence is seamless: story and picture are fused with a dreamlike logic. For me, the last three lines especially are perfect--both in the picture they bring to mind (no doubt this is what Goldman Sachs executives do instead of pillow fights) and their versification, which moves from the frenetic enjambment of "Drunk businessmen..." to the peacefully iambic line about sleeping lemons. Without being proscriptive, let me point out that this is one thing that good poetry can do: it offers a dreamlike alternative to the world we know--an alternative that may just leave some residue in our waking perceptions.

There's a great deal more to say about Amy Gerstler's poetry, and I will share more of her gems in future posts. But for now, let me conclude with her poem entitled "The Bear Boy of Lithuania": a prose poem that, like a Wes Anderson movie, succeeds in capturing extremely improbable (and therefore volatile) syntheses of emotion among a group of people.

The Bear-Boy of Lithuania

Girls, take my advice, marry an animal. A wooly one is most consoling. Find a fur man, born midwinter. Reared in the mountains. Fond of boxing. Make sure he has black rubbery lips, and a sticky sweet mouth. A winter sleeper. Pick one who likes to tussle, who clowns around the kitchen, juggles hot baked potatoes, gnaws playfully on a corner of your apron. Not one mocked by his lumbering instincts, or who's forever wrestling with himself, tainted with shame, itchy with chagrin, but a good-tempered beast who plunges in greedily, grinning and roaring. His backslapping manner makes him popular with the neighbors, till he digs up their Dutch tulip bulbs. Then you see just how stuffy human beings can be. On Sundays his buddies come over to play watermelon football. When they finally get tired, they collapse in heaps of dried grass and leaves, scratching themselves elaborately, while I hand out big hunks of honeycomb. They've no problem swallowing dead bees stuck in the honey.

A bear-boy lkes to stretch out on the floor and be roughly brushed with a broom. Never tease him about his small tail, which is much like a chipmunk's. If you do, he'll withdraw to the hollow of some tree, as my husband has done whenever offended since he first left the broad-leafed woodlands to live in this city, which is so difficult for him. Let him be happy in his own way: filling the bathtub with huckleberries, or packing dark, earthwormy dirt under the sofa. Don't mention the clawmarks on the refrigerator. (You know he can't retract them.) Nothing pleases him more than a violent change in climate, especially if it snows while he's asleep and he wakes to find the landscape blanketed. Then his teeth chatter with delight. He stamps and paws the air for joy. Exuberance is a bear's inheritance. He likes northern light. Excuse me, please. His bellow summons me.

Let me start again. True, his speech is shaggy music. But by such gruff instruction, I come to know love. It's difficult to hear the story of his forest years with dry eyes. He always snuffs damply at my hand before kissing it. My fingers tingle at the thought of that sensitive, mobile nose. You've no idea how long his tongue is. At night, I get into bed, pajama pockets full of walnuts. He rides me round the garden in the wheelbarrow now that I'm getting heavy with his cubs. I hope our sons will be much like their father, but not suffer so much discomfort wearing shoes.

Mission Statement

"Your end should be one inapprehensible to the sense, then it will be a god always approached & never reached[,] always giving health. The aim is all; not the methods. The true poet though he drink wine and eat like a cannibal is really temperate, because he proposes to himself a spiritual & unattainable & immortal good in those melodies which draw him on; he has no disgusts."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson (JMN 8:12)


Although I can't exactly lay claim to the temperance that Emerson champions here, I share his sense that poetry often exists as aspiration--that distant desire that stirs at odd hours when drinking a glass of Malbec or chomping on the femur of a friend doesn't quite satisfy us and the combination of indigestion and baffled animal sensibility makes us receptive to the muffled music coming from the house next door (you know, the one with the offal-free hardwood floors, built-in bookshelves not made of bone, and plenty of natural light). That half-heard melody, so Emerson says, is the cue to our moral awakening, and we stumble out of whatever lair our brute sensuality and minimal teacher's salary has provided for us, into the dark street where we mistake the landing lights of planes for stars. Perhaps it is lucky that the true encounter with poetry can never happen--we merely wander the streets like Raskolnikov, snarling and beating our breasts at intervals for the beauty that only comes as perpetual rebuke to our heretofore lives. And how awkward would it be, standing in the well-lit doorway with paw upraised, as the gentrified party suddenly goes silent--the stalwart tropes, the pretty polyptotons pause and cower--and the six-pack of Schlitz we brought as a housewarmer is covered with a patina of blood? Well, no doubt, you are nodding your head at this point: been there, done that, so what? But before you toss your lion's mane of kingly indifference and go back to gnawing on zebra gizzards, here's the point: this blog should be cannibalism for the high-minded, draped with the delicate limbs of contemporary poetry, where we can chew on the new, really sink our teeth into it. So, whoever you are who've stumbled here, whatever blood is on your cheek or sleeve, won't you pull up a chair, stay awhile, and so to speak dig in?