| Pavane for a Cyber-Princess |
She Was There for Him the Last Time | In Far Pale Clarity |
| Bruce Boston | ||
| Miniature Sun Press, chapbook |
Miniature Sun Press, chapbook | Quixsilver Press, broadside |
Bruce Boston has three long poems out now and its difficult to say which is
best because they're very much the same, and very much different. "As far
as the East is from the West" always puzzled me. At some point, the East
becomes the West, doesn't it? So, too, is the difference between Pavane
for a Cyber-Princess, She Was There for Him the Last Time and In Far
Pale Clarity.
Either way, you will need to pull out your dictionary. Boston's better
poems have become more and more a read-skies-at-night lexicographer's
delight. Boston supplies the reason why I sometimes balk at always using
the common man's vocabulary in "When the Wordmonger Screams" in his
collection Short Circuits: "he could find no clean words, only those
shrouded by mistory, up from the bog and down from the dung heap, trailing
threads, string, fluff, second-hand, overused, underdone, parboiled, wearing
thin..., doing it again, one more time, and again-and-again words." Though
lexicography is not next to Godliness in poetry, it conveniently gives us
our natural order in this review:
In Far Pale Clarity is something of an ironic misnomer, for the poem
anchored in abstractions is anything but clear. If you've read it, you may
have scratched your head and tossed it aside as pretentious (mostly because,
if you will admit it, you didn't understand). When you buy poetry, it is
for quality time -- a time equal to the time spent with a hundred-fold words,
words you read again and again because the references and cross-references
continue to pull you in as they become clearer. Some poems are
what-you-see-is-what-you-get and aren't as rewarding as, like this one for
myself, you have to read it, think on it, read it again, focus on stanzas,
on lines, on the way the words are put together, and on the way they're
split apart. I'm not making a case for difficult poems, but even poor,
simple poems should be deceptively rich. A reader comes to poetry expecting
to linger on the view, and if it doesn't reward the investment, the reader
may not be inclined to sit through a second unveiling. This is no doubt why
people untrained to observe the arts get bored at art galleries while their
enthusiast buddies hang back. Some will never train themselves to observe
and will never understand and will be forever subject to the whim of popular
political rhetoric, to every damn commercial on the boob tube. Once
trained, you're liable to get bored if there isn't more than meets the eye
in a work of art. I once bought an art book and a relative used it as
evidence I was throwing money away on books.
Luckily, Boston often rewards patience. I've read enough of him to rely on
his not regurgitating a bunch of random words, expecting me to gorge on the
resultant chaos for meaningful entertainment (though now that he's read
this, he may do just that. Every artist rebels against the definitions of
art -- a point I'll come to again with Pavane for a Cyber-Princess -- but
hopefully artists have glazed over meaninglessness by now: isn't that what
bestsellers are for?). Strangely, after nothing on three reads, my mind
snagged on
not titian red nor rubens rose
for this is far pale clarity
this is ashen thought
In his "Introduction to 'The Simple Art of Murder'," Raymond Chandler
writes, "The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing."
In other words, entertain us, dear writer. I would like to tag on the
addendum that the work of genius can be read forward as well as backward,
which is what She Was There for Him the Last Time quite literally
attempts.
Expecting only another banal blurb, I was a little annoyed by finding Andrew
Joron's explications on the back cover, which you might find in an
introduction. I wish he had given us fair warning before telling us in the
first sentence that the poem "is a... hymn to the muse as a harsh mistress."
I can tell you in a review because you'll forget by the time you read the
poem and can always reference this review later... unless you have an
eidetic memory, for which I'm grateful to have spoiled the poem's unraveling
for you lucky bastards (but probably the eidetics rely too much on the
picture of things rather than the meaning, I console myself). But if you've
ever read Wallace Stevens, you probably wouldn't have needed Joron's insight
anyway.
What makes the poem unusual apart from telling its story backward and a muse
to the SF poet is a yet another layer of meaning. Double layers of meaning
are fun. Triple is quite a trick: both for reader and writer. The first
layer is the surface events, the second the muse's relation to the narrator,
the third layer is that -- you eidetics who can actual think had better stop
now and go buy the poem for yourselves -- this is truly mother nature leading
the poet and humanity to their respective deaths:
We travel backwards in time with her as she metamorphoses alongside her
fellow man intimating the fate to come that we were too dense to pick up on
but is obvious in retrospection (hence one reason for the order):
until he heard the curses she muttered...
she was there as a conjuror's trick
one colored box inside another until the smallest
she was old as the towers beneath
trailing twigs and bent flowers and wet bits of soil
I'll save the little surprise of why she is not the Muse in the end though
he no doubt meant to deceive us with the reverse order and section titles of
the narrative section. If you own the poem and don't know why, email me and
I'll respond. The two sections that didn't work as well for me were
"environs" and "proem." I thought they could be combined and condensed.
But I may be wrong. This may be the greatest long poem the genre has yet
produced if I am. But it is difficult for anyone to sustain a long poem.
Some will lament the loss of privacy in what David Brin called our
"transparent society",
but it's about damn time people start considering consequences before they
blithely sin against their brothers. Aren't you sick and tired of our
aristocracies (be they kings/queens, medical deans, CEOs, or capitalistic
and communistic presidents) dicking people over just because they can?
Maybe when we realize the camera eye is focused on our misdeeds, we'll
behave more honestly for once.
Like any human being, I can't divine every allusion. I prefer if the author
can give the reader a hand, but he is by no means required to do. One of
Rita Dove's better poems is titled "Parsley," but if you didn't know that
was the word that fascist regime used to delineate wheat from chaff, you
would miss a key element of the poem. I'm thankful to have read Tim Pratt's
saying that Pavane for a Cyber-Princess was based on a dance. It led me
to Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Princess" which was originally a piano piece
that became a concerto that eventually became a ballet. You can read about
"Pavane for a Dead Princess"
and listen to it
(~28:30 into the program). Ravel named the work only because he liked the
sound, which is convenient for Boston's allusion since he can take off in
any direction from there. (When I asked Boston to verify that it was based
on Ravel, he wrote back, "That's cheating!" I confess to my literary
sluttiness of cheating on Boston, but I cheat only for you, my dear readers,
to all of whom I remain forever faithful [reviewer breaks into power ballad
by Journey].)
This might have easily been a favorite with its intriguing and fluid
narrative of a frankenstein's cybernetic concubine, but a few snags
prevented it from sealing the case. The first is the first line. It
prevented me from wanting to read more: "Her exquisite cadaver"2. Prose
readers will fail to understand, but poetry readers require the weight of
every single word. No doubt, the majority of readers find the word
"exquisite" exquisite, but it's space filler. One could have substituted
"nice" or "pleasant" or "pretty" or "lovely," etc. and been just as happy.
I probably wouldn't have noticed if it didn't occupy the primary position of
the poem in the first line. It may just be my prejudice. Other reviewers
quoted it as a wonderful line, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Besides, once you get past it, your problems are over...
...unless you demand absolute beauty in your poems (forgive the reviewer,
Father, for he knows not how he blasphemes) because this poem is
horrible -- not horribly written but horribly clashes and jangles in a rhythm
jerky and uneven. He mixes the hard "k" and "g" and "d" with the sibilant
sounds of "s." Compare "She Was There for Him the Last Time" [~ =
unstressed, people's scansion may vary some]:
to Pavane for a Cyber-Princess:
Letters with hooks and eyelets (` ~ ~ ` ~ ` ~)
The speckled rind of her integument (~ ` ~ ` ~ ~ ~ ` ~ `)
How dare Boston write an ugly poem? How dare readers demand their poetry
always be beautiful? Should every television station play only Hallmark
movies and After-School Specials? Think about that first line I quoted you:
what could be "exquisite" about a cadaver? a cadaver prostituted to the
rich and abusive? You aren't supposed to like the beauty of this poem. If
you find it beautiful, you probably like the unsyncopated ruckus of German
brothels at their peak hours*:
"She is the recurring imago
If Boston's deservedly respected name weren't plastered to the cover, I
wonder how many editors or readers would blanch at the sounds and pass. But
since Boston is Boston, people will listen as if he still speaks in beauty
though he speaks in horror -- no matter how straight forward he tells it.
At the end of each section, a glossary provides the dictionariophobes
definitions like " 'Henchmen' as in 'chief executive officers.' " Not all
are always so witty nor revealing: " 'Most pampered' as in 'combed and
petted to the ends of trembling distraction.' " Still, it's an interesting
experiment.
Boston wanted a blurb for Fictionwise who will soon be releasing this poem
as an e-book -- a fair request considering I'd already told him I had enjoyed
the poem. Unfortunately, I bungle blurb-ese. Tim Pratt, a fine writer in
his own right who would sell more with his finesse than I but with whom I
couldn't disagree more for why you should buy this poem, writes, "The poem
is beautifully done, as stately and elegant as the dance from which it takes
its name." I think the poem sells itself and if you're a Slan and aren't
induced by the following, chances are you're an exquisite cadaver yourself*:
1
"The poem's intent is not 'to rail against the black and white clarity
of logic' as it is to portray the difference between passionate involvement
and logical reflection, and how memory loses the emotional reality and rich
detail of the former and embraces the simplified and removed reality of the
latter. The most obvious and instantaneous example can be found in sex, at
least for men. There is an immediate and profound change in emotional
perspective from the moment before orgasm to the moment after. Freud
believed that every orgasm (the male one) represented both a kind of death
and a castration (see the last line of the poem). However, it also
represents a rebirth, for the individual that exists after orgasm is a
different person, with different interests, feelings, and needs, than the
one that existed moments before. And in a very real sense, one who can no
longer feel or really know (except intellectually) the emotion that so
recently consumed its consciousness completely."
2
Regarding "exquisite cadaver," Boston enlightens the reviewer, not in
its allusion but in its elaboration, "The term originally refers to a
Surrealist party game in which one person would start a poem at the top of a
page, fold that part over, and pass the page on to another person, who would
add a line or two, and then pass it on again. The result would be a poem
composed of bits and pieces from many different sources, just like the
Frankenstein monster, and in this case, like the Cyber-Princess, who is so
conglomerate that she can be seen as representing snatches from all of
history that has preceded her, including the historically determined roles
of the sexes. Many 'exquisite corpse' poems have been published, even some
in the genre field." All of which is true and only adds to my evaluating
the Frankenstein sound to its meter. But since the poem is speculative by
nature, one cannot help but transpose another layer on top of this: that
the human species, should it continue to prefer propagation with non-living
simulacra, is doomed.
3
"These sections are intended to extend the metaphors, similes, and
allusions of the poem further, to add complexity and subtlety of meaning
rather than diffuse it. The very last stanza does this for the entire poem.
Thus these definitions might be seen as introducing branching symbols in a
tree of meaning that continues to grow, and in truth, could grow
indefinitely beyond the poem. Again, I'd refer you to the introduction to
J.E. Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols. I reread this every four or five years
just so I don't forget what language is and how it functions." I agree that
the experiment does just that, most of the time.
*
Pardon the reviewer's ad hominem attacks on the in absentia opponent of
Bruce Boston. They're simply to elicit an illicit chuckle or two.
Just because other reviewers don't allow writers to respond doesn't
mean
that it shouldn't be done: see "argumentum ad populum" on your lists of
common fallacies. Writer and reviewer don't have to see eye-to-eye, so long
as they can justify their arguments. If you see it as a writer being
defensive, then is the critic the only person allowed to have a say in a
writer's legacy? That's horse puckey. Give a logical, non-fallacious
answer why he shouldn't, apart from the writer failing to speak
intelligently, in which case the reviewer shouldn't quote him unless the
reviewer means to humiliate him. I may be a Trickster, but a cruel bastard
I ain't though I may play one on TV. Besides, a little intelligent debate
with multiple perspectives is a helluva lot more enlightening than your
regular blurb-ese babble, anyway. Finally, even though Boston wrote it,
it's out of his hands: not that our disagreements are major, but where we
do disagree, you may assume he is in the wrong because, as they say in the
cartoon industry -- and you may quote me on this when speaking with
Boston -- pbbbbt!
++
If you still can't tell when I'm joking, follow this handy rule of
thumb: if it sounds mean, it's a joke -- though I am deadly serious when I
say to quote me to Boston.
Trent Walters' work has appeared or will appear in The Distillery, Fantastical Visions, Full Unit Hookup, Futures, Glyph, Harpweaver, Nebo, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Speculon, Spires, Vacancy, The Zone and blah blah blah. He has interviewed for SFsite.com, Speculon and the Nebraska Center for Writers. More of his reviews can be found here. When he's not studying medicine, he can be seen coaching Notre Dame (formerly with the Minnesota Vikings as an assistant coach), or writing masterpieces of journalistic advertising, or making guest appearances in a novel by E. Lynn Harris. All other rumored Web appearances are lies. |
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