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More Glorious than God

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-7199403

2164-0041

Jeremy Bass,

The forces aligned against the individual in our current sociopolitical moment are staggering. Even as our society seems poised to embrace a more expansive concept of inclusion and diversity, the backlash of misogyny, homophobia, racism, and xenophobia has grown in response. It is difficult to look at the events of recent months and not conclude that we live in a culture defined by conflict. One of the most urgent conflicts we face today as a society is between individuals attempting to inhabit a unique sense of their own identity and a significant portion of society that denies, in increasingly violent ways, both that individual’s identity and their right to claim it. This conflict—between prejudice and inclusion, the clash of cultures and the fractured totality they create—has sadly become the narrative of our country. But it is arguably also the narrative of human history. In an interview given over 50 years ago, James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” 1 The written word offers not just an immediate response to our moment in time, it reminds us that our struggles are historical, providing a connection to “all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.” 2 All the more prescient, then, is poet Robert Pinsky’s new book At the Foundling Hospital (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $23), a work that grapples with our historical connection to the vibrant and violent forces that create culture, and to the foundlings who are cast off along the way.“I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors,” Pinksy declares in his poem “Creole.” It is a fitting tagline for a book that opens with the description of Hermes inventing the lyre from “wiry rabbitflesh . . . pulled taut across the gutted / resonant hull of the turtle,” and whose last poem, quoting an old saying, ends “that’s the story of my life.” It also reframes what for Pinsky is an essential human trait: reverence, in this case, not for religion, but for culture and the act of creation itself. For Pinsky, our culture is inherently Creole, bred from different histories and identities into a whole.The ways in which we create and change culture—and the ways in which culture forms around us and changes us— have always been the central obsession of Pinsky’s work. From the first poem of his first book, “Poem About People,” to the wide-ranging associative poems in 2010’s Gulf Music, Pinsky examines our myriad acts of creation in musical, muscular lines that pulse with humor and intellectual rigor. Greek gods, saxophones, song lyrics, and family stories. At the Foundling Hospital, Pinsky’s seventh volume of poetry, finds the poet laureate mining themes he’s made his own over four decades of writing, and loading every rift with ore.Readers familiar with Pinsky’s greatest hits—“History of My Heart,” “What Where When How Whom,” “At Pleasure Bay,” and “The Shirt”—will find new favorites in At the Foundling Hospital, which contains trademark interweavings of stories and history spliced together through meditations on the meaning of names and language, phrases, of music, or popular sayings. “I confess,” he says in “Creole,” “I find that Creole work more glorious than God”; it is in these poems that Pinsky’s reverence for the patchwork amalgamation of our fractured culture is most palpable and enjoyable.Take the poem “Running with Noodles,” where the etymology of a derogatory name for Italian immigrants, “noodles,” is traced back to the creation of pasta in Italy, itself a combination of imports from China and South America: “Columbus brought Italy the pomo d’oro / As Marco Polo brought the noodle from Asia.” Thus: “Spaghetti with red sauce is Aztec and Chinese.” “Creole” presents perhaps the most declarative depiction of this sentiment while navigating a discursive framework: political maneuvering between Jews and Italians in postwar New Jersey is retold alongside the creation of languages in the hinterlands of the Roman Empire:The Roman colonizing and mixing, the Imperial processesOf legal enslaving and freeing, involved not just the inevitableFucking in all sense of the word, but also marriages and birthsAs developers and barbers, scribes and thugs mingled and coupledWith the native people and peoples. Begetting and trading, theyHad to swap, blend and improvise languages . . .In this sense, poems in this new book reach back to Pinsky’s earliest work, where “prose virtues” are employed to harness the “clarity, flexibility, efficiency [and] cohesiveness” normally reserved for historical analysis or memoir (Situation of Poetry, 162). Pinsky uses this mode of discourse to claim, as he states in his earliest book of criticism, The Situation of Poetry, “the right to make an interesting remark or to speak of profundities, with all the liberty given to the newspaper editorial, a conversations, a philosopher, or any speaker” (Situation, 145).Other poems, such as the aptly named “Culture,” attempt less of a coherent resolution between disparate things and rejoice instead in chaos: Auto-Tune software and Rwandan history mashed up against T. S. Eliot and Charlie Chan, the clash of objects and images creating a web of cross-pollination as intricate as the culture and history it attempts to describe. “The City” juxtaposes Pinsky’s memories of his youth with reflections on the “village” where he lives now, trying to locate, among memories and musings, the elusive center of the modern city:Sometimes I think I’ve never seen the City,That where I’ve been is just a shabby districtWhere I persuade myself I’m at the center.Or: atrocities, beheadings, mass executions,Troops ordered to rape and humiliate—the news,The Psalms, the epics—what if that’s the City?“The City” grapples with a question that is fundamental to Pinsky’s poetry and criticism, that “the truest political component of poetry is the sense of whom the poem belongs to” (Poetry and the World, 122). If the City has a center, Pinsky argues, it inevitably creates a periphery, a space where foundlings languish and die.A foundling is “an infant that has been abandoned by its parents and is discovered and cared for by others.” 3 “Foundling” is not a word that is much in circulation these days (as opposed to the word “orphan”), and Pinsky’s use of the Middle English derivative suggests an attention both to the roots of the English language, itself a Creole invention, and to the pervasiveness of abandonment throughout history. The word also emphasizes in particular the act of discovering and caring for what has been lost. Part of the mission of At the Foundling Hospital is to gather and reclaim, if only through language, individuals or groups of individuals who have been denied a place in the larger historical narrative. This happens on a singular level as well as a collective one, from Pinsky’s classmate from grammar school, “the foolish one who died in the course of war,” to “Chinese immigrants / In the dark Angel Island / Internment cells of San Francisco.” Pinsky includes not only human beings in his search but also disappearing languages and abandoned cities, arts and styles lost to time. His poem, “Improvisation on Yiddish” (Yiddish, the speaker observes, is “Tongue of the dear and the dead, tongue of death”), mingles Yiddish phrases with variations on their meaning, while “Orphan Quadrille” catalogues dying elements of culture in a song that is both elegy and celebration:Lost arts of cochineal enamel and earthen bell foundry.Shelling of the Parthenon, flooding of Sioux burials.Let’s caper in memory of our mothers and fathers.(Step and turn, step to me darling)At the heart of this volume is “The Foundling Tokens,” a poem that collects many of the book’s overarching themes in a single place: the Foundling Museum, itself a creation of culture dedicated to memory. Here we find abandoned children, the need to name and create meaning through names, the etymology of words and our darkest periods of history, all linked by the fundamental urge to create, even if just through “fragment[s] of a tune or a rhyme or name / Mumbled from memory.”The power of naming is fundamental to Pinsky, both in the fact that names are often variations on a larger theme, more akin to music than language, and also because they imprint on their owners deep intention and meaning. Names are “arbitrary but also essential . . . Not just an allusion, but also an example.” There are entire poems in At the Foundling Hospital that read like associative catalogues where Pinsky explores the interchangeability of names and, by extension, the interchangeability of experience:My real name is Israel Berlin. My fatherWas a Roman slave who gained his freedom.I was first named Ralph Waldo Ellison butI changed it to the name of one of your citiesBecause I was born a Jew in Byelorussia.The various speakers in “Mixed Chorus” claim the freedom not only to give and take experience but also to form their own identities, choosing their own names and lineage:My other name is Flaccus. I wrote an essayOn the theme You Choose Your Ancestors.It won’t be any feeble, conventional wingsI’ll rise on—not I, born of poor parents. Look:My ankles are changed already, new white feathersAre sprouting on my shoulders: these are my wings.As the speaker’s tone and the variety of names suggest, At the Foundling Hospital situates the drive for the creation and expression of identity in a cosmic and historical context that is much larger than any one life. In the poem “Procession,” for example, “submillimeter waves from across the universe” carry inside them the web of couplings and births that leads to any one individual, “everybody by descent the outcome of a rape. / Everybody also the outcome of a great love.” All of this is imagined inside the network and wiring of “an array of antennae / Sensitive to the colors of invisible light” on a sacred mountain in Hawaii, where each ray of light contains the whole of human history riding “astride matched tortoises on a road / nine microns wide”:The heart of each telescope on Mauna Kea,Is a tube finer than a hair on Vishnu’s head.On each hair of each Vishnu’s head, a processionOf subatomic tortoises crosses the universe.In the skull of each tortoise in that processionA faceted jewel attuned to a spectral channelWhere Kronos eats us his children, each contractingBy each one’s nature a micron suture of light.At the Foundling Hospital ends with a series of short, compressed poems that are surprising given Pinsky’s predilection for broad, wide-ranging meditations. Borrowed blood, the end of civilization, robots shaped like dragonflies that take to the sky “in varying unison and diapason . . . [to] dance the forgotten,” these poems read like parables of the end-times of civilization, a dissolving of the very fabric other poems in the book attempt to construct. Translations from Hebrew and Baroque Spanish, meditations sprung from the Bible and the Torah, these later poems attest to the interpret-ability of language and the adoptive and adaptive nature of shared experience, even as they spell out our doom. It is not exactly an uplifting vision, though it bears along a cold kind of beauty. The robots who dance our extinct culture in the sky mirror the sensors on Mauna Kea: “Their exquisite sensors will comprehend our very dust, / And re-create the best and the worst of us, as though in art.”If Pinsky chooses a historical instead of personal or political lens to view the theme of identity in culture, it must be acknowledged that this is a luxury he comes to by way of his own identity. Poets of color, queer poets, poets whose native language is not English or whose expressed identity places them outside what is currently accepted in our seesaw culture of ostracization and appropriation are often denied “permission” to write from a purely historical or cosmic lens, relegated instead to a restrictive category of “identity poetry.” This seems, however, less of a reason to discount Pinsky in this particular context, but rather a cause to read him as closely as, say, the stunning recent work of Claudia Rankine or Ocean Vuong, and to read these books in dialogue with one another. At the Foundling Hospital’s attempt to examine the struggle between individuals and culture is an extension of Pinsky’s career-long dedication to the democratization of poetry and the power of the written word to transform language into a more universal experience. These poems are imbued with a sense of generosity and inclusion that is sorely missing from many who might claim a similar identity. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” 4 In the face of simplistic ignorance and enmity, in the grip of conflict that seems both senseless and unavoidable, it is a blessing that contemporary poetry continues to grapple with the complex and difficult, establishing a conversation that is more necessary to have now than it has ever been.