We Begin in Gladness by Craig Morgan Teicher

Author:Craig Morgan Teicher [Teicher, Craig Morgan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-872-3
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2018-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

2.

Susan Wheeler’s body of work may be the best compliment John Ashbery could ever receive. While Ashbery’s style and concerns have been aped to some extent by perhaps half the poets to come along in the last quarter century, no one but Wheeler has actually tried as hard, nor succeeded, through the creation of her own art, to understand, by imitation then extension, Ashbery’s particular mind, as if from the inside. Something in Wheeler wants to be Ashbery, at least to think some of his thoughts; or, perhaps more precisely, by wearing an Ashbery costume, Wheeler has been able to come closer to herself, her own quirky, polyphonic, polylingual voice that, like Ashbery’s, moves through the histories and registers of the English language and its linguistic cousins as if in search of, though without real hope of finding, the meanings those languages orbit. Plus, to those high-minded concerns of Ashbery’s Wheeler adds a sexiness and wariness of the language used to discuss sex, and a more pointed interrogation of the ways so many of our problems—especially in terms of money and power—are in the language, rather than simply expressed by it. These are the subjects of Wheeler’s major long poem and her most self-conscious tribute to Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait,” “The Debtor in the Convex Mirror.”

Wheeler’s early poems, while fun, funny, whimsical, and interesting, are not, in light of Wheeler’s increasingly significant and individual later work, imperative reading, except inasmuch as they introduce her predilections, point to her later work, and narrate her apprenticeship to Ashbery. In them, we meet a poet as drawn to following as to breaking formal rules—there are plenty of sonnets, careful rhyme schemes, carefully chosen and percussive words, and there are as many poems that spill irregularly down the page and sound relaxed if not prosy. These poems also exhibit a then-new poet who has intensely studied Ashbery and the other major New York school writers, plus all the poets they read, and run their ideas through her own sensibility thirty years after they first published. As in the poems of her forebears, varied voices and dictions flow together, almost without regard for the divisions between high, low, new, and old registers. A couplet like this one, which concludes the poem “Bag ‘O’ Diamonds,” is a good example: “Oh yet who considereth the faith / Can ye slam the wong straight?”

And, like any good new poet, she tells us in one early poem—if not, obliquely, in all of them—how to read her:

… it is this voice that makes you

swoon: this story is one loosening tool listing into another,

each bearing its affects like wants, like tricksters’ cups.

Sleep now: it is always in the telling, not the tale.

In this early instance, Wheeler signals that we need not be as concerned with the subject as much as the matter—the materials—of her poems. This is one of the basic tenets of Ashbery’s style, but Wheeler gives it her own particular, and peculiar, flair. Note the use of the archaic “tricksters’ cups” and invocation of fairy tales in the last line.

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