A Green Light (review)

Simplistic doggerel. Nonsense. Lacking character, lacking heart. I have heard Matthew Rohrer's collection A Green Light thus dismissed by people whose opinion I generally trust without hesitation, most of whom are themselves distinguished poets. I suppose that this trust has now been called into question, for I couldn't disagree more with this response to Rohrer's book. A Green Light is a dazzling collection, full of courage, earnestness and – most importantly – heart. In fact, I would argue that the stakes are so high in Rohrer's book that the safety of such quick dismissal is almost too alluring to pass up. The poet, in language at once both fresh and glib, confronts the fundamental – if also too easily dismissed – dilemma, recognized almost one hundred years ago now by Wassily Kandinsky in his Concerning the Spiritual in Art, of how to express the transcendent within the limitations of the various artistic media. Read closely Kandinsky's words, as they've not faded one iota in their truthfulness since 1911, have, perhaps, become even more germane to us now:

The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip. Only a feeble light glimmers like a tiny star in a vast gulf of darkness. This feeble light is but a presentiment, and the soul, when it sees it, trembles in doubt whether the light is not a dream, and the gulf of darkness reality.

Rohrer resolves this doubt by giving us A Green Light, his meditation on a life rightly lived within the confines of a human world terribly out of whack, a world in which "[t]he nightmare of materialism" has become an inescapable fact. "I'm going to sit here until I feel my soul" pronounces the poet in "MK Ultra," and I, for one, applaud him for making his stand against that "gulf of darkness" into which we have all now fallen, and out of which those of us with any heart at all are doing whatever we can to lift ourselves. In "Cloud Walk III," the poet acknowledges the muck – having come to "the bridge to Toilet Island again/Crossing back to money worries,/to their shame" – while at the same time he tries to remain unsullied by it all. It is nearly impossible for the poet, through the agency of the speaker, to do, and although the final line admits as much: "I must fight to concentrate" the sense is that the fight will not be relinquished so easily.

Lest we get carried away in trumpeting Rohrer as communard and secessionist, however, it is important to note that not all is fire and brimstone with him; often his poems are imbued with an unabashed zaniness, a cartoon quality that seems to overshadow the more contemplative and confrontational aspects of the poems. This is often the reason why Rohrer's poetry is viewed as clever but somehow lacking. But it would be a shame to see the poems in A Green Light neglected merely for the fact that Rohrer doesn't shy away from engaging the language and imagery of popular culture.

I have seen what others have only dreamed they've seen. I have seen underdog in startling full-color on a black and white TV. I have seen the illicit mushroom activities on the moon. I have seen the pandas in the darkened park. The cashier at Sears who wore no bra; the little brown and yellow cloud that hovered over my grandparents' house; adults replaced by Replicants in 1977; I have looked into the mirror and seen two dark pools of humility. Others have only dreamed they've looked into the mirror.

("Poem for Underdog")

What is wrong with using "Underdog" to illuminate epiphany, or in spinning a serial poem – which is what I believe A Green Light to be, despite the individual poem titles of many of the poems – out of a diction primarily concerned with the attentions of the adolescent, even the pre...