The Histories by Jason Whitmarsh (review)

Jason Whitmarsh writes like this:

He had to admit that he didn't love Alexander Calder's Eagle as much as he loved his wife, and that he didn't love his wife as much as he loved his children, and that his children he liked to see fall asleep so he could watch a movie.

That's the first line of "History of Art," one of the many "History of X" prose poems in Whitmarsh's new collection The Histories. It's not the volume's finest poem, but it shows most clearly the author's voice, a voice at once common and completely individual. The voice is common in that it's comic surrealism, with clear influences from John Ashbery and Dean Young (the latter of whom blurbed the book). It's uncommon in that Whit-marsh's poems embrace closure and use interpersonal karma as a moral foundation.

Let's talk about closure first. Many poets in the open form tradition have railed against closure. Ashbery once remarked that poetry "is going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length." Lyn Hejinian lambasted "the coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry … with its smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth." These writers generally do not write, or appreciate, tight verbal machines with clear-cut beginnings or endings. Jason Whitmarsh does; indeed, it's tempting to see some meaning in the fact that Whitmarsh was a math major in college, because his poems show the sort of grace, sense of direction, and finality you'd expect of a mathematical proof. Consider one of the most brilliant Histories, "History of the Horsemen":

A horseman was found horseless on the side of the road. […] How did we know this was a man who lacked the very thing that defined him? We knew because we ourselves were horsemen, and we ourselves without horses.

Quod erat demonstrandum. Whitmarsh's surreal poems can follow loopy paths yet still feel like direct inquiries into what we value, inquiries that aren't worth their salt unless they return an actual answer.

Whitmarsh is at his worst when he's merely being clever, but it helps that he's genuinely clever, as in "Into Two": "The time machine, if invented, will mainly affect the next edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. The future perfect will have to extend to what will now have already happened in the past." Generally, Whitmarsh's poems balance a zany cleverness with an awareness of the limits of zany cleverness, such as the fact that zany cleverness won't prove our loyalty to our loved ones. This latter theme goes back to Whitmarsh's appropriately titled debut collection Tomorrow's Living Room, which contains many poems about marital tension. There are fewer fighting couples in The Histories, but behind Whitmarsh's humor there's a general concern for how we will or will not hurt specific other people, as in "History of the Heart": "By means of various surgical techniques and dark rooms, by means of water and spooled wire, by means of a sudden and upward motion, the heart that was yours was not yours and then was yours again." Or in "History of Anger": "We made a machine for getting angry. … We put the machine in a box and put the box in the ocean. We put the ocean inside of us, wave after wave of it. We held steady." Or in "History of Advertising": "Half the people said I love you and half the people couldn't say it back."

The author's ethical focus is on people trying to hold onto the fabric of their lives despite their tendency to jockey for attention and power. Some of these poems have a parable-like quality; one of the volume's best poems,"This Heavy Lifting" describes a man who lifts "trucks, truck stops, small hospitals," and "golf courses, suburban neighborhoods, the ones with small ponds and SUVs" only to find...