Climbing Sylvester's Ladder

¦view Climbing Sylvester's Ladder Bill Porter The Imaginary Poets Edited by Alan Michael Parker Tupelo Press http://www.tupelopress.org 160 pages; paper, $19.95 Anyone who was ever halfas devoted to Saturday morning cartoons as I was should know what a good makeshift cartoon ladder looks like. Now and then, by some totally unembarrassed miracle, the ceiling from which Tweety Bird's cage suspended would soar to hundreds of feet above the parlor floor, and Sylvester the Cat would have to build one of these things — a vertiginous, ramshackle Babel, founded uncertainly upon a Frigidaire—and begin his doomed climb, over kitchen sinks and suitcases, six-ton safes and pianos, to the top. As an ascent both precarious and wacky, Sylvester's ladder makes a fittingly offbeat metaphor for the maniacal scaffold of formal constraints and triple-ironies erected by editor Alan Michael Parker in The Imaginary Poets. Twenty-two poets assault the summit: their task is to "translate" a poem by a fictitious foreign author and provide, along with a short biography of the imaginary poet, a critical essay on the poet's work. The truly devilish difficulty, which makes sufferin' succotash of much of the volume, is that we readers know all of this in advance, thanks to Parker's introduction. The contributors lack even the shelter of a real hoax. That doesn't mean there's any problem with the design. Parker persuades me that The Imaginary Poets offers another way to think about the writer as ventriloquist, one both serious and camivalesquc: the contributors here have written poems that needed to be "translated" first.... As a result, the ways in which these poets see their imagined others offer a distorted self-portrait of sorts.... The problem, rather, is that the temptation to such distortion often proves too great. Most of these imaginary poets are hideously afflicted: half of the book might have been redacted and renamed The Imaginary Holocaust Survivors, and there's a motley complement of bulimia, abortion, and prehistoric lesbian mysticism. (The jazzy appearance of D.A. Powell's arresting, full-voiced JoäoPudim — the one imaginary poet who makes alcoholism sound like fun — is deeply refreshing.) Certainly the credentials of suffering and estrangement should animate and inform our interest in real writers— Tadeusz Borowski is the most devastating example — and we all understand the allure of the inexhaustible fertility every poet must see in the subject of World War II. Still, writing about World War II is not the same thing as inventing its victims. As anyone knows who has heard "I wrote this during a really hard time in my life" uttered really earnestly in a college classroom, True Suffering is the cheapest ofthe contemporary poet's merit badges. The poems here do attain a much higher emotional and historical altitude than the typical breakup sonnet from Creative Writing 101, and their apologetic preambles are, thank God, less honest, but the basic formula is the same: trade pain for authenticity. This is a powerful formula on special occasions (Paul Celan, Wilfred Owen), but it simply cannot work in this book, where we know that the pain was never suffered. It's hardly more complicated than this: we saw these dreary solemnities coming. Who, faced with this project, wouldn't have considered writing their way into Normandy or Auschwitz? (There's something , well, captivating about great mountains of gore, and, besides, relatively few ofthe dead wrote in English.) The occasion of The Imaginary Poets calls for the antidote to our expectations: wit. Striking one of the truest notes in the book, Parker writes in his introduction that he presents his collection "with serious glee." I take it that this is something like the sweet feeling you get just before you speak the awful pun that everyone is expecting, dreading, and secretly, against all higher pretensions, hoping to hear. Serious glee is ceremony without ceremoniousness; it is the mood oftall tales and the finest cartoons—think ofWile E. Coyote as enacting a rite, always and endlessly whistling down from those cliffs, battered but invincible—and the stamp of this book's most successful contributions. The best moments in The Imaginary Poets happen...