The Riderless World

Review Swartwout continuedfrom previous pageAmerican Ghost Roses exhibits many such changes in language and thought, just as the author's photos do. A bird or two are still flying around, but no angels . The wordplay self-reflects rather than assumes shared knowledge, which hones the language toward a sharper signification. For me, it's exciting when a poet grows out of his usual pumpkin patch and clambers over the fence of What Poetry Is Supposed To Be (and of course we know that it should be and not mean), although Kevin Stein has long been at the more fluid edge of poetry writing. His earlier poems are accessible, often neoromantic, and the lines are crafty and crafted with tight language and line-fitted imagery. You get to know the family, the dog, and what the poet was thinking for breakfast that segued metaphorically into my life or yours. Serious and well-written poems, but with a faraway, poet-is-not-the-poem feeling to them. American Ghost Roses takes off the gloves to reveal the brass 'nucks that we suspected were there all along. Postmodern punch, sweaty and honest, fragmentation of language, discontinuity ofthought. Not the same beautiful poet. As an example of the difference, accented by each poem's resolution, look at this earlier Stein poem, "A White Lie of Sorrow and Comfort": O what's the use? I'm still wondering what's the lesson, the beauty or the sting of it— as if anything might come of anything not promising both. I'm wondering as if wondering weren't the answer, the gradual dispatch of the world we trust, the song of elision even angels can't sing, a throaty cry, our cry. Now compare it to "An American Tale of Sex and Death," from American Ghost Roses: as Zombies sang "it's the time of the season · for loving." My friend Clayton, black as his name, kicked the gang leader's butt. For me, he said. I looked in his eyes, he in mine. America? Sure: Clayton's in prison, I write sonnets. The truth? Look it in the eye or you're blind. American Ghost Roses takes off the gloves to reveal the brass 'nucks that we suspected were there all along. From the "O" to the very omega of the first poem, a neoromantic impulse directs emotion and evokes transcendence, while combining with the more modernist trait of avoiding closure. These are not evil traits; in fact, it's nigh impossible for a human organism to completely eschew what has been defined as neoromantic: in musings ratherthan assertions , in appeals to emotion rather than overt use of the art ofshock. And modernism haunts every writer who writes down the godtrick of universal meaning. Gelpi explains that any modernist skepticism "lay in the epistemological process of coming to know rather than in the conviction that there was something finally to come to know aboutthe selfand the world." Hence the importance, in the past, ofLarge Concepts such as Death, Love, and Beauty. Nothing wrong with that history, either, except that it's history. In the poem "An American Tale of Sex and Death," Stein couches the romantic impulse in juvenilia —lofty love of Shakespeare and knighthood, Olivia Hussey's breasts, and holding hands in the movie theatre. The poem turns on a race riot and a beating, to end with a rock-hard sense ofclosure in its reminder of extreme prejudice. The voice isn't musing a Concept, with the reader listening in. Instead, the poet is sincerely in-your-face, stating a much glossed-over reality that America is not the land of the free. The poet aims more directly toward a statement rather than a mulled consideration. The poem's persona demands credence for what it knows from its own experiences, negating the need for pretence of any modernistic objective reality. This authorization of subjectivity is another mark of postmodern poetry—formerly considered a weak trait, one that edged uncomfortably close to being confessional poetry and uterus odes. When I was a young "poetess," the PC theory was that, while it was okay to use "I" in a poem, one should hardly think of...