Rescuing Poetry

Rescuing Poetry Matthew Guenette Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man James Cummins and David Lehman Illustrated by Archie Rand Soft Skull Press http://www.softskull.com 144 pages; paper, $14.95 Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man is the lampoon of misdeeds high and low in American Poetry. Many of the poems here are hilarious, virtuoso stand-up performances, accomplished formally through the roller-coaster ride of the sestina by an unlikely tag-team duo: James Cummins and David Lehman. However, in a twist, to resist identification, the book refuses to credit which author wrote which sestina until its very end. Theoretically, this should shift focus squarely to the poems. However, funny as the poems are at times, the dual authorship creates a lingering problem: if comedy that strikes at the powers that be tends to spring from the margins where it hones its edge, then clearly, as the poems in fact bear out, one poet in Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man will be funnier than the other. The biggest surprises, and the best laughs, in Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man arrive in poems where Dave and Jim—or is it "Dave" and "Jim"?— appear as their own characters. For example , in the poem "David Lehman & Jim Cummins Parachute into Iowa City," Dave and Jim are charged with rescuing Iowa's MFA program from surrealism gone wrong: I got the call at 4 a.m. David said that he'd been up since three. "It's bad.man," he told me on the phone. "Just talked to the Head Guy. They've botched surrealism, man. I know, I know— hard to believe. But it's the real deal: they take the personal and add blue feathers, man." Right then I felt a whistling near my heart. "Noway...." Way. The poem goes on to achieve a dark, comedic frenzy: Iowa City falls into anarchy, Maoists take out formalists, and the fire chief, apparently a more astute student of poetry than the students themselves, shouts out one the poem's best lines: "No surrealism / but in things!" This hyperbole, of characters and scene, transforms Iowa's tradition and privilege, its cult-of-personality , into a pratfall and pie in the face at once. The presence of Dave and Jim, absurdly cast as a dynamic duo paramilitary poetry rescue team, shows Cummins and Lehman are not above the joke. Just as impressive is how the poem, even while making fun of its subjects, offers up itself—an outrageous sestina experiment—as a live and lively way into the avant-garde Iowa's students have not only so badly botched, but foisted onto the American Poetry scene as a type of genius. If the mannered theorizing at Iowa is one of American Poetry's misdeeds, then another is the writing conference, where star-gazing aspirants go to worship, presumably, poets not unlike those who pass through Iowa's halls. In "David Lehman & Jim Cummins Rescue Denise Duhamel from a Summer Writers' Conference," the conference in question is "Smarmee." At this thinly disguised Sewanee, "It's not about writing— it's &food chainV and "you're only good / ifyou pretend your poems are numinousl" Here Cummins and Lehman present Duhamel— a stand-up diva in her own right, known for poems that are both smart and funny—as the antithesis of the writing conference poet. We're invited to picture her, eyes glazed, in need ofair, as an example ofwhat poetry could be—singular in the spirit of, say, Dickinson , another poet whose work showed no interest in running with, or giving in to, a mediocre crowd. Dave andJim are charged with rescuing Iowa's MFA program from surrealism gone wrong. A featured reader at "Smarmee," the wonderfully named "Alfred E. Numinous" is another example of what Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man does well: when the wordplay is witty, not merely clever, it gets used conceptually to rescue the unexpected in poetry from two of its evil emperors: institutionalized predictability and arrogance. Presumably, "Alfred E. Numinous" would be a freaky, jug-eared, gaptoothed , mystical idiot poet. But ofcourse Alfred E. Neuman, the AfAD Magazine icon, has always been political, a...