Michael Earl Craig's Poetry

In the spring '72 issue of The Seventies, Robert Bly told us that there are two types of surreal poetry: leaping poetry and hopping poetry--lines that leap in disparate associations from the emotional psyche to haunt and disturb the readers by challenging rational thought and the dominant culture; and lines that have a sense of play, wit and fun in their associations but don't jump very far and aren't very committed to "the inner world" of the Other. In all of his Neo-Lutheran gravity, Bly comes down sqarely on the side of socially defiant(Spanish-speaking) leapers and poo-pooes the French hoppers and American counterparts like John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and the St. Mark's or New York School--and, by extension, James Tate and Michael Earl Craig.

What I like about Michael Earl Craig's poetry in "Yes Master" is that, frankly, he doesn't give a flying fuck. When he says "yes, master" in his poetry, he could easily be mouthing off to the somber, indignant unconsious of Bly and his Spanish leapers--as well as his own. He doesn't mind letting us know that he's not rationally in control of his poetry, so if it's witty, sardonic, and hops, well, what the hell is HE supposed to do about it, write in accordance with some doctor's prescribed form of the unconscious? "It's as if the nurse has adjusted my cheeks/with the cotton balls, has turned/in her chair to shop at Nordstroms,/and my open eyes begin to ice over like bird baths."

The act of writing poetry is so selfconscious that only an idiot would pretend that he/she's the oracle of his/her uninterrupted libido. I mean "What is the word/for when a nun rolls a boulder/away from the mouth of a cave or tomb?" What if, when you pick up cashews, you "roll/them over and over,/examining their little/spines, searching for eyes/and assholes/and so on"? Are you supposed to pretend it's not happening because it doesn't seem profound? Craig sums it up well, "I'll just have to keep typing/toward you, who are unhappy/with my driving. Understanding/that when a lover is undoubtedly dead,/her shoes will fall off."

Pamela Gemin's "What's Going On"

Pamela Gemin's poem, "What's Going On" (see link below) is a wild ride through both Detroit and a plethora of influences on contemporary poetry. Like many other poems written these days, the language has decided that Eliot was full of crap when he saw the present as a squalid wasteland cut off from a glorious past. Gemin's poem knows that the wasteland is all we've got for our poetry, whether we learn to live with it or not.

The same might be said for W.C. Williams' poetry, but fresh typewritten imagery was so new to him that he put his poems down like polished gems. Gemin's poem rides through the present of "nineteen seventy-something," blase about history, allusion, form, etc. yet slightly aware of them all. Like Plath and Larkin, the poem is aware that parents "fuck you up," but it's too wrapped up in its own present to dwell on it.

All we know as readers is that we're driving through Detroit with a bunch of teen-age girls in someone's Mustang to see someone's sister's new baby, that someone has a big stuffed dog, and that the car is full of big stuffed hungover heads. The readers also get their heads stuffed with "what's going on" in the car to the point that they participate in the hangover. We get wild specific questions about whose parents are doing what, culminating in a puzzling "Take this and eat" communion blurred into baby spiders hatching out in a vacuum cleaner bag and someone's mother saying why don't you girls get your hair out of your faces and hold your heads up.

It doesn't do this poem justice to try to figure out its significance on a first reading. Only after you let it drag you along for the ride do the poem's occasional rhymes start resonating with Marvin Gaye's music and the joy of being alive in the squalid present of Detroit in the nineteen seventies--in spite of bitter cabbage rolls and someone's father knocking someone's mother down the stairs. The cult of poetry about abuse, victimization and recovery in confessional poetry takes a back seat to a big stuffed bear, a Mustang full of gabby, hung-over girls, and a new baby.