Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2008

Book Reviews

The Single Diamond Made of All Our Lives 

GULF MUSIC: POEMS by Robert Pinsky
Farrar Straus Giroux, 2007

Review by Tony Hoagland

IT'S HARD TO OUTRUN the burden of having been poet laureate. For those readers who have a misconception of Robert Pinsky as a honky, wonky establishment former poet-laureate, the poem "Louie Louie" might be the right place to start reading his new book, Gulf Music. Like the 1960s pop roadhouse song it refers to, in which indecipherable, vulgar-sounding lyrics are drawled and growled, "Louie Louie" the poem is irrational and mischievous, deliberately adolescent, and defiant:

  ... I have heard of Kwanza but I have
  Never heard of Bert Williams.
  I have never heard of Will
  Rogers or Roger Williams
  Or Buck Rogers or Pearl Buck
  Or Frank Buck or Frank
  Merriwell at Yale.
 
  I have never heard of the Pig Boy
  I have never heard of the Beastie
  Boys or the Scottsboro boys but I
  Have heard of the singing boys, what
  They were called I forget.

"Louie Louie," like so many of Pinsky's poems, is a Culturesong, a lyric about the complex dance of history, memory, artifact, and tribe. It suggests that we (Postmodernistas? Americans?) are erudite but simple-minded, sophisticated but half-literate, and that we live suspended in a medium of references of which we are mostly unconscious. The poem acts as a kind of purge, spitting out the host of names that we've internalized, both trivial and profound.

Pinsky's obsessions, it is now clear, are lifelong: myth, culture, language, material life, and national consciousness, the mind of nation. These are the particular province of his alertness and attention. His meditations about what binds us together are passionate, nuanced, full of insight and unexpected connections. Culture, including poetry, is both our way of transcending and belonging to our place and time. "Culture the lock, culture the key," he says, in "Poem of Disconnected Parts," "Culture the penalty. Culture the escape."

But discursive understanding alone will not suffice. Only song can perform poetic knowing, and poems are uniquely valuable because they live halfway between sense and cry, memory and invention. Like knowledge itself, they have a "varying, unstable relation to meaning," which is paradoxically part of their expressiveness. That kind of loose, variable intensity is visible in the flashcard-like couplets of "Forgetting":

  ... Memory of so much crap, jumbled with so much that seems to matter.
  Lieutenant Calley, Captain Easy, Mayling Soong, Sibby Sisti....
 
  I used to wonder, what if the Baseball Hall of Fame overflowed
  with too many thousands of greats all in time unremembered?
  You'll see, you little young jerks; your favorite music and your
    political
  Furors too will need to get sorted in dusty electronic corridors.
  Ezra Pound praises the Emperor who appointed a committee of scholars
  To pick the best 450 Noh plays and destroy all the rest, the Fascist.
  The stand up master Stephen Wright says he thinks he suffers from
  both amnesia and deja vu: "I feel like I have forgotten this
  before."....

Such jazzy idiomatic interplay of perspectives is typical in Gulf Music. It is in many ways the poetic mode of our moment, in which poetic "dislocation" is eloquent of the polyglot distraction of contemporary life. Yet, if the energy of such a poem comes from its discontinuities, its art shows itself in the precise orchestrations of order and disorder. Pinsky's disorders are ingeniously coherent. Omnivorous and discriminating at once, they veer and teeter and incorporate without melting into the chaos of the conditions they describe.

In the beautiful, more narrative poem "Banknote," the poet describes how personal and national identity, money and self, chance and fate, are woven through human life:

  Behind city walls, calm rituals of exile.
  The Brazilian cleaner hums and sponges the table.
  A civil quiet between us I will not break
  By chanting my gratitude in broken Polish.
  She has the courage to be my great grandmother Ike.
  Thanks to his passage a century ahead of hers
  I get to sit at this table, I write the check.
  To recite this to him through her would be foolish.
  Her only language for now is Portuguese,
 
  Though every week she knows more English words....

The poem goes on to enviously describe how the Brazillian banknote carries a poem printed on it, a poem written in Portuguese about "the single diamond made of all our lives."

  ... The poem/Is about a poem he intends to write about the single
    diamond made of all our lives.
  From gluts, dearths. From markets, forced migrations.
  Nossas vidas formam um so diamante.
 
  ... Locked blind in the diamond, its billion cuts and facets,
  Molecules in an obdurate equilibrium of pressures, we cannot see the
   shifting fire.

A poem about a poem about a poem, set in a city "of wilderness paved," "of privilege and deprivation," where graffiti is sprayed on security shutters: a kind of in-folded diamond itself. In such faceted images as these, Pinsky offers us a vision of our world poignant, precise, and paradoxical enough to be convincing. Pinsky's work asserts the diamond vision; we many dreamers, circulating in one large dream.

Pinsky is as omnivorous as any postmodernist, as originally strange and American, ambitious and adventurous. This brief review cannot give an idea of the textural variety or allusive richness of the poems. Pinsky's work may not be for the reader hungry for explicit anguishes of personal life. Nor will these poems necessarily appeal to readers who hunger for the wit of dislocation as an end in itself. But if the essential act of a poetic sensibility is to sense, discover and chart correspondences, then Pinsky is one of our best living American poets. In book after book, his poems have practiced a non-reductive allegiance to the We, the collective. Gulf Music shows this poet at the top of his form—not just lively, but also noble. 

Award-winning poet Tony Hoagland is the author of three volumes of poetry and a collection of essays, Real Sofistakashun, all by Graywolf Press. He currently teaches in the poetry program at the University of Houston.

Source Citation

Hoagland, Tony. 2008. The single diamond made of all our lives. Tikkun 23(1):59.