Mixology (review)

We all remember our old student editions of Pope and Dryden, in which a page containing as few as two or three lines of verse would be filled with all manner of footnotes, usually long, erudite, and obscure. While John Dryden and Alexander Pope assumed their privileged leisure-class contemporaries would understand all their clever references, we, poor benighted moderns, were told that we needed this baggage of annotation in order to comprehend—and of course to appreciate—what the poets had written. Pope and Dryden aren't the only examples, of course. Literary history is full of them, and most of us have run afoul of them at one time or another. What many readers now think of as "old" poetry—and especially the poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—is often heavily allusive and intertextual; hence the perceived need for annotations to guide the modern reader. It was just this sort of closed community of elite readers that William Wordsworth famously blasted in 1798, in the little "Advertisement" that prefaced his and Samuel Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. Poetry, he argued, should speak plainly and directly, without any need for critical or editorial "middle-men." Wordsworth was talking about the professional critical establishment that was emerging at the time, but his comments are relevant to today's editors and anthologizers, who still annotate, annotate, annotate.

How badly do we need this sort of editorial gloss on today's poetry? Can we "get" the poetry without it, and if we cannot, what does that tell us about the accessibility of that poetry—and about any author's assumptions about, and expectations for, her or his readers? This is a particularly important question when it comes to Adrian Matejka's second collection, Mixology. Selected for the 2008 National Poetry Series, Mixology will be widely read and discussed—and probably taught. And it is going to require of its readers an unusual degree of engagement, for it is not an "easy" collection, for a variety of reasons. Not everyone will "like" Mixology. Readers are likely to be passionate on both sides: the book leaves little middle ground. But this may not be a bad thing. Most artists would agree that the worst fate that can befall their productions is audience indifference—a collective yawn and a moving-on to something that may do a better job of getting a rise out of the reader.

In Mixology, the complex allusions are so many, and they involve so many areas and levels of contemporary culture (and cultural practices), that much of the poetry may be—or may seem at first to be—obscure to an "average" literate reader of poetry in 2011. To what degree is a poet permitted to require us to work hard in order to "get" the poetry, then? Should we be required at all? Let's pose the question differently. Do we owe it to any artists to do our best to learn their language and their "discourse map" as part of reading their works accurately and fairly? Underlying all these questions is an assumption that is so fundamental it generally goes wholly unstated: any literary work (indeed probably any work of art, regardless of medium) is both a "product" (or "production") and a sort of blueprint, or "training manual," that educates its reader (audience) in how to "read" and evaluate that work. Every act of reading—like every act of aesthetic perception, cognition, and assessment—is also simultaneously an act of learning and of "practice." It's just that most of what we read does not make us so fully aware of this demanding operation, this brain-work, as Mixology does.

Take the title. The "mixology" in Mixology refers to bartending and to the mixing of cocktails specifically. But it also refers to contemporary recording studios and the electronic mixing of sound tracks to alter or otherwise manipulate them. The Oxford English Dictionary also tells us that the suffix "-ology" means "the science or discipline of." So, Matejka's "mixing" identifies both a subject and a methodology, a science. But there's more, for...