n.b. Since Graham Foust blurbed my forthcoming book, I don't feel comfortable writing a formal review of his glorious new Nightingalelessness. But the poems are too good for me to stay silent on; so I'm going to put some thoughts down here.
“The Nightingale” is the founding ghost of modern consciousness—caught between waking and sleeping; between song and silence; between idle fantasy and visionary imagination; between painful physical reality and aesthetic escape; between mortal death and immortal transfiguration. Instead of seeing these spaces between as a static prison or simple closed-off abyss—neither this nor that—Keats’ innovation in “Ode to a Nightingale” was to see the poem as an energized field of activity. The poem tracks the movement of thought in a new way. Two centuries later, it’s a way we’re still reckoning with.
Keats’ great poem begins with the “light-winged dryad of the trees” and ends—“fled is that music”—with the creature’s silence. This is the point where Graham Foust’s Nightingalelessness begins. As the second poem in the book begins, “Oh, I lead off with loss again” (“Sentence Sounds”). Foust’s poems take up Keats’ project to explore that space between the lost past and the future we seem to be losing faster everyday: “History was a mirror at a corner of the future” as he says in the book’s first poem, “Appraiser.”
The past is gone. The future is going fast, a fact made all the more obvious with reports of climate change and species extinction. The present’s not much better, somewhere off “around the corner in a room / against a wall near the floor.” (“Appraiser”) Or, as he says in “Sentence Sounds,” “the present / tense behaving the back way into the past.”
How do we locate ourselves then? There are gardens in this book, and movie theaters, playgrounds, hotel rooms, dark bars. But maybe location is not the answer.
The answer may lie in the ability of the particle to be both present and not present. Quantum mechanics indicates the indecisiveness of the most stubborn matter, which is now understood to be both here and there, substance and absence. That’s an understanding Keats had no access to, though he might well have understood it given all the losses he attended to, of his parents, his brother, his lover, and, ultimately, himself.
While the governing energy of Keats’ poem is anxiety, for Foust’s poems it’s humor. The joke is the thing that “is not meant” and yet conveys meaning. The joke is made up of words, but the laugh that follows the joke cannot be explained.
Foust’s book is filled with play: between words, between ideas, between pop songs and canonical poems. The most canonical poets of the 20th century-—Eliot, Frost—are deployed as jokes that take and twist their words in play that does not mock but instead does the originals honor. This is a skill he shares with John Beer—and, not incidentally, the Eliot of the Waste Land—as is his ability to weave pop culture staples into a state of deep play with ideas.
“Field Day” is energized by the puns that begin even in the title. A “field” in painting is the background setting for the figure. A “field” is also another word for a parcel of earth filled with grasses, crops, or flowers—it’s a cultivated space, as opposed to a meadow or a plain. A “Field Day,” is a day set aside for play, where the cultivated space is no longer the site for work but for goofing off, for games. The games here are linguistic, a playground for ideas: “what thought is: // the opposite of money, which change (pun lived with) / or for one definition of ‘interest’ to have vanished.” Foust has an uncanny ability to work with words across the full breadth of definitions. Here the “change” in money is both what’s leftover after a transaction and the act of transformation where one thing turns into something else. Similarly “interest” here functions as both the focus for thought, as well as the money that accrues (if you’re the lender) or depletes (if you’re the lendee) resources over time.
Foust is also a master of rhyme, deploying it to draw similarities between disparate ideas while simultaneously indicating distance. In the collection’s eponymous poem, rhyme both roots and moves thought forward:
Everyone who’s dead’s now ”problematic”—
leave that out of this.
You’re where you write not fading into traffic.
But that rumor’s always attached to here
Is absolutely capital—you hear
Of a bird; you hear, in fact, a bird.
You can hear the distance travelled in this poem from rhyme to rhyme: from “problematic” to “traffic”; from “here” to “hear”; and from the idea of a bird (“you hear of a bird”) to an actual (“in fact”) bird. The distance between what’s real and what’s imagined is not any closer than it was before the poem, but the “traffic” between them has increased and, increasing, brings them closer even as nothing has physically moved. The action is in sound, even sounds that are homophones: “here” to “hear.” Present is both absent and accounted for.
In “American Originality”, Louise Gluck writes, “Rilke claims for himself the attributes of non-being, space flooded by impressions.” (17) Foust eludes the trap Rilke set for poets in the generations to follow by moving in the opposite direction. Foust’s poems are an effort to empty himself of all his evident learning, “I should...throw the whole works / into the drink.” (“Anniversary”). Or, as he writes in “Q&A”: “I’d give my right brain for a box to haul / my ideas a little less than halfway across the country / so that they could be unceremoniously dumped into the Pacific.” “No ideas but in things,” Williams wrote. But what happens when the “thing” is the Pacific, and what’s going into it is all the “ideas”? Well, the ideas dissolve.
The poems in this book are spilling-over with erudition, and yet at the same time utterly humble. It’s a work grounded, in “Poem to my Daughter”, in “getting the mirror to mean / not only me.” We can’t escape narcissism, but with love (a word threaded deeply, surprisingly, thoughtfully, through the whole book), we can open it up, tickle it, get it talking, and talking to it, listen.
