Waiting for the King of Spain (review)

REVIEWS 169 first love of her life — and he is right. If this were the entire poem it would still be turning over, and over. A little drama in a circle of hell. But Rodgers isn't content to dramatize the contradiction (as she had been in "Slave Ritual"), and she isn't prepared to look into the contradiction itself for the seeds of a resolution. Instead she tries to impose the answer that her ideology has armed her with-proceeding, in a long coda, literally to drown out the questions with a hymn. But such questions, and the misery they speak of, cannot be dissolved by hallelujahs (or by mantras). The trouble with transcendental leaps is that they are timeserving , and can only land back on the spot they took off from.2 Yet that spot is where the poetry is, and the questions that didn't go away, and the solutions growing inside them. James Scully 1.Here the operative definition of 'ideology' is roughly that sketched by Engels: "Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him: otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence, he imagines false or seeming motive forces. Because it is a process of thought he derives its form as well as its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. . ." Etc. 2.Of course this is not to imply that religious belief or ideology has no effect on the course of people's lives. It does. Again to quote Engels: "In connection with this is the fatuous notion of the ideologist that, because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres which play a part in history, we also deny them any effect upon history. The basis of this is the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction . These gentlemen often (almost deliberately) forget that once a historic element has been brought into the world by other, ultimately economic causes, it reacts, can react on its environment and even on the causes that have given rise to it." Diane Wakoski, Waiting for the King of Spain. Black Sparrow Press, 1976. My daughter, who has become a "Star Trek" rc-run addict, firmly believes that if she were to make note of the "star dates" Captain Kirk reads into his log, she could work out a chronological order for the programs. Each episode would then stop being a singular event and take on the continuity of a genuine "history," which is, of course, what the program pretends to be. When Diane Wakoski places at the end of her latest book the statement that "all the important information" about her life can be found in her poems, 1 understand something about the nature of my daughter's delusion. A poem is by nature a singular event. But when wc arc made to understand that a group of poems can be regarded as "autobiographical," then wc expect that they too can be regarded as a history. The fact is that what a person feels strongly might not be the sort of thing thai shows up on resumes or in standard biographies. Add to this the element of lhe poet as mythologizcr of his own experience, that distortion or rejection of fact in favor of a fiction 170 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW which seems truer to some inner quality of life, and the whole notion of confessional poetry may simply rest on the power of the poet to create the illusion of confession. As Wakoski herself points out: "Life is often more allegorical/ than it should be." And it is hard to resist giving life a push when it is already moving in that direction. 1 think, then, it might be more accurate to say that Waiting for the King of Spain is a re-run of the illusions which Wakoski has carefully constructed over the years as to what constitutes her life. Or, as she says by way of preface to a section entitled "Reviewing ," "the new is...