Forgeries

Forgeries Laurel Blossom The After-Death History of My Mother Sandy Mcintosh Marsh Hawk Press http://www.marshhawkpress.org 96 pages; paper, $15.00 Sandy Mcintosh's entertaining new volume might be mistaken, at first, for a merry romp through personal and literary history conducted by a slightly confused, well-meaning people-pleaser. His confusion begins with his bemused revelation that he has (maybe) two mothers, and continues through various other doublings (dream transformations, reincarnations , literary "forgeries," literary mothers both male and female, poems masquerading as prose and vice versa) to a final doubling (double-crossing) that brings with it a "broade [sic] awaking" to reality. Not that these poems are necessarily funny, or that all of them stand up completely on their own poetic orprosaic feet. But Mcintosh's imagination is so vivid that the primary response to them is delight. A section dealing with his literary mentors (David Ignatow, Allen Ginsberg, H. R. Hays) tells some bitchy stories about their jealousies and amour propre : Ignatow telling his tearful wife that he deserves as many girlfriends as he wants because he's worked sohard; orHays halting overthe reading ofhis poems in German, complaining that Brecht's translations had turned them into Brecht poems with "not much of Hays" in them. An extended prose poem, or short story, "Bride of the Mall," tells the tale of a couple switched (maybe) at the altar. The satirical "Prof. Ferguson's Weekend," another extended prose piece, plays on the farcical lengths to which "techniques of observation, valuation and thought" can go in the service of serious (maybe) social and literary understanding. Understanding lies at the heart of our hero's quest. Obsessed as he is with finding a person or idea through which to understand himself, however, his search leads only to confusion and speechlessness. Here is the mother whose "name was Silence." Here is a Hay(Na)Ku, an example of the poetic form invented by Mcintosh's colleague, Eileen R. Tabios, accompanied by á "Handy Pronunciation Guide" that, charmingly but effectively, erases speech: pronounce '"L' as second T in 'Llewellyn'" and "'w' as 'w' in 'wrist....'" Here is Ignatow reducing his student to inarticulateness by his apparent harshness. Silence and confusion, in tum, lead to all kinds of disappearance. The husband and wife at the mall don't recognize each other. The mother vanishes onto a strip of recorded tape. Professor Ferguson disappears intohis obsession. Hays's poems are obliterated by Brecht's translations. This is a book ofelegies—eulogies, really— to all the literary bastards who have made Mcintosh an artist and (maybe) a con. In the final long poem of the book, "Obsessional ," Mcintosh relates, in a successful structure using both poetry and prose, a multilayered story of betrayal, legacy, understanding, and misunderstanding that illuminates all the poems (whether lined or unlined) that have preceded it and confirms the subversive intelligence of the poet who organized them. A graduate student invites his roommate, "the famous poet, / Max. . .," to sit as a peer on his thesis panel because, in his eagerness to please, he has mistaken Max for an ally, an "equal," when in fact Max betrays him, recommending against acceptance of the thesis. The thesis involves the assertion that the sixteenth -century poet Nicholas Grimald recast the originals of the poems of Wyatt and Surrey to fit a smoother European mold prior to their publication in an early anthology of English verse called Songs and Sonnets (later Tottel's Miscellany [1557]). In so doing, Grimald established English poetry along lines that betrayed its origins; he and the publisher "Tottel snatched / real English poetry, replacing / it with counterfeit." The student declaims his theory at a party; the response is boredom, indifference, and solitude. Outraged, he asks himself why he is obsessed with Grimald's "forgery." The question resonates all the way back to the lies told him as a young boy by his mother. Mentors have failed him, friends have failed him (see "My Friend Ignatius"), dreams have failed him, fictions have failed him; will the history ofEnglish poetry, will poetry itself, fail him too? Is it, as Max asserts, "bastards still / that maketh / art"? The answer, like so much else...