Literary Figurehead Writes Serious Poetry

I have a confession to make. When I read poetry, I like to be romanced. I like a poem to take my hand, twirl me around, offer me wine and roses and seduce me into its satin-draped bedroom for the night. I want poetry to move me beyond myself. I want poetry to offer itself up to me body and soul and say "take me, love me and sigh because I am beautiful, sigh because your heart rips apart when I speak to you."

John Hollander does not move me. His poems are not verses that romance-filled 16-year-olds also reading The Bell Jar will dog-ear and gloss with pink pens. No "how-do-I-love-thees" cling to Hollander's pages like damp, juvenile kisses. Hollander's newest book of poetry, Figurehead, insulted my delicate romantic sensibilities at first with its apparent lack of poeticized emotion and what seemed overly intellectual, self-conscious and anal attention to grandiose metrical dexterity, complete with a hyper-inflated vocabulary that rivals Webster.

But before the English concentrators in the audience begin to rant over these naive poetic presumptions, I will remind myself just in time that great poetry extends beyond merely the spontaneous overflowing of powerful feelings and into a realm where form nearly always matters. "There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence," T.S. Eliot once wrote, as though speaking directly in Hollander's defense.

And, OK, so Hollander is in his 60s. So he's already published 17 books of poetry. So he's a "modern master." So he's definitely not writing for lovesick adolescents. I guess I'm willing to accept that the grandiosity of his technique has a purpose beyond self-conscious display.

Using poems of metrical dexterity that are filled with wit, subtle humour and a vast vocabulary, Hollander brings many common poetic themes to light in Figurehead in admittedly startling forms. Experimenting with various meters, dictions and forms, Hollander's poems continually strive to discover, in the process, the perfect poetic language (or what Hollander terms "the back room of meaning").

The search for the original language, the purest language of poetry, inevitably leads Hollander into age-old questionings about the line between art and truth. The really fascinating (and even kind of moving) poems in Figurehead express a powerful anxiety over the duel power of art to both display and destroy truth. Art, Hollander claims, is not only an "'expression'/ of pain and longing, of delight and hope," but also is a physical power in and of itself, intimately connected with physical pain and destruction. Hollander continually focuses on the ultimate emptiness of all art. He obsesses over the power of art to ensnare. He agonizes over the necessarily painful awakening from art's mere illusion of beauty.

In "Arachne's Story," one of the most profoundly unsettling poems in the book, Hollander describes the terror of art overtaking life and becoming more real than life itself, turning life into a void emptier even than art. Describing an image in a Arachne's web, Hollander claims "That image of her seemed, for too long a moment,/To be even more real than she was herself." Searching for the deepest realm of truth, he moves into layers of representation, "the metaphor within the metaphor,/The thing itself, that very thing" and finds himself caught in a downward spiral of artifice in attempts to locate truth and the perfect language.

Obsessed with stripping away levels of reality through poetic form and controlled language, Hollander looks at art from as many directions as possible in order to get at the truth. In the last part of Figurehead, Hollander moves into evocative poems describing particular works of art (Edward Hopper's "Sun in an Empty Room" and Charles Sheeler's "The Artist Looks at Nature" are two paintings Hollander interprets poetically), effectively enfolding a work of visual art within his own poetic representation and creating Figurehead's most visceral and visually evocative poems.

Whether Hollander discovers the palace of truth and the place of the perfect language is doubtful: poetry better have a way to go before that happens. And even though Hollander won't make you cry or even sigh, he will awe you with carefully crafted rhythm, intricate rhymes and poems electrified by questions of truth and art. So, yes, I'm saving the pink pen for Plath and Shakespeare and can appreciate Hollander for what he is: a mature experimenter with lots of questions and a very big mind.