"Within Stone / the Mind Writhes"

For those who know Frank Bidart's poems, the idea of him as a great entertainer (one of the greatest entertainers in the last fifty-plus years of American poetry, in fact) may seem perverse. This is, after all, the man who began his first book, in the voice of a character, "'When I hit her on the head, it was good, // and then I did it to her a couple of times,—'"; this is a poet whose latest gathering of poems (titled Thirst, and included in this new Halflight: Collected Poems) concludes, in his own, with a joyless pun, a play on a knock-knock joke without the joke:

Sometimes when I wake it's because I heara knock. Knock,Knock. Twoknocks, quite clear.I wake and listen. It's nothing.

Arguing unrelentingly, book after book, that much of life is beyond healing or hope, complaining in another poem about our age's disinterest in tragedy, asserting, disdainfully, "Most of us blunt and mute this war in order to survive" (453); this is a poet who opened one poem "Measured against the immeasurable / universe, no word you have spoken / brought light" (428) and seemed convinced—often seems convinced—that falling short of such a measure should be understood as failure. Who wrote in another poem, once again referring to himself, condescendingly, as "you":

Understand that there is a beast within youthat can drink till it issick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. Understandthat it will use the conventions of the visible worldto turn your tongue to stone.

(376)

But Bidart's tongue does not, with rare exceptions, thicken. It moves—his poems move—almost athletically and always, to borrow from Roethke, more ways than one. They redeem the time of our reading, making it agile, purposeful, alert. In embodying absence and despair, they create a body that can live with sorrow. They succeed, like metaphors, by their embrace of that unlikeness, their ability, in being paradoxical, to be (like people) more than one thing at a time. If that which might "turn your tongue to stone" is the fundamental threat, the adversary that is also often the darkest and so truest truth, Bidart's lifetime of labor has been a largely and phenomenally (and yes, entertainingly) successful act of resistance.

In an illuminating interview with Mark Halliday from 1983, reproduced in Half-light, Bidart repeatedly explains his breakthrough into poetry in terms of motion, action, and voice. "I knew," he says of his early failures to write something satisfying, "somehow, however gropingly and blindly, that there must be some way to get down the motions of the voice in my head." A poem, he says multiple times, "imitates action, and is an action." And, drawing from Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, he insists "the activity on the author's part has to be in a satisfying relation to the difficulty, the density of his materials." And then, responding to Trilling again:

This image of the will "unbroken but in stasis"—after having "exhausted all that part of itself which naturally turns to the inferior objects offered by the social world"—and which has therefore "learned to refuse" … This image has haunted me: it seems to me a profound pattern, one of the central, significant actions that many works have.

(685)

From first to last, Bidart has reached for that ideal—that paradoxical combination of stasis and motion, a mind invoking that which is beyond change in poems that move with often thrilling agility, even as their agility recalls the earth that pulls the embodied spirit toward oblivion. Vaslav Nijinsky, one of the many alter egos that have allowed Bidart to place the dilemmas of his life outside himself, where they can once again move and be moved independent of his life, so that he may once again resist and revel in them, complains of the dancer he cast in "The Rite of Spring":

The training she and I shared,—training in...