I’m idle, as osmanthus flowers fall,
This quiet night in spring, the hill is empty.
The moon comes out and startles the birds on the hill,
They don’t stop calling in the spring ravine.
— Wang Wei, “Birds Calling in the Ravine”
If you’re the kind of person that reads the introduction to a book before the book itself, I recommend dispensing with that habit, at least for this one — just get to the poems. Anyone familiar with modern poetry and the issue of translation should have little use for August Kleinzahler’s introduction. There is the discussion of poetic antecedents, the music and wordplay that gets lost when poems are morphed from one language to another, but what really gets me?
Kleinzahler perpetuates the “poetry as puzzle” configuration I find not only damaging to the art’s public life, but impractical to a reader. “Poetry of trap doors” doesn’t impress me. As long as I am not being spoon-force-fed, and as long as the poet isn’t bullshitting him/herself with sloppy protest or hollow solemnity, I’m usually psyched enough to simply walk around in someone else’s mind when I read their poems. The “poet as double-agent, working both sides of the border and traveling incognito” strikes me as the work of some hack B-critic (which he is certainly not, according to a recent article by David Orr at the New York Times).
To give credit where credit is due though, Kleinzahler — a pretty good poet, actually — does offer one useful description, noting Sommer’s “mix of off-handedness, the depoeticized treatment of subject matter, the focus on the domestic, the strangeness and significance of the minor and ephemeral” — nothing earth-shattering, but it is accurate.
With that in mind, you’ve all you need to walk around in Sommer, who gives us his twenty-five years of his voice, a unique mix of the casual, chatty, near-mystic, weary, and wry. Kleinzahler and translator John Ashbery both cite Frank O’Hara as an influence, and it’s true that O’Hara’s chatty observations and on-the-fly commentary have been gladly absorbed by Sommer. Mark Ford also notes in a review published by The Guardian “Like O’Hara … poetry is above all a way of engaging life, rather than a means of retreat from it”. This is — please forgive the Micky Mouse word choice — a happy situation.
Combine this “regular guyness” with an apparent affinity for the eighth century Chinese poet Wang Wei — and his mind for natural detail, his devotion to the image, his suggestions of human de-/illusion. By then, you’ve got something pretty special, evidenced by one of the book’s highlights, “Fragile”, and its swimming through the nebulous zones between sleep, waking, dream, and memory.
“Confirmation” is the book’s wow-er. From its blunt opening “I got boozed up because of Stasio” to its closing with sleep, Sommer is on, narrating a bit about a child’s birth, asking “Why make things prettier/than they are?”, later varying it as “why make even prettier/what has already turned out pretty well?”, looking ahead to death, integrating a mini-discussion of verb tense — it’s just a stunning, sweet, and (as the title aids us) spiritual poem.
There is something so clean and spare about his methods, like Wilhelm Hammershoi’s paintings or Pierre Reverdy’s poems — at times dramatic but quietly so, determinedly observant, devoted to imagery and scene. Nearly every poem springs from/exists in the Relentlessly Everyday, but those scenes are drawn with a fluid mix of beauty, sorrow, hope, and grit, and the result is that creeping-but-cool enlightenment that one arrives at with the best poets. “Space (after Wang Wei)”, minus its last two lines, is a good example:
We live secluded under the smoke of steelworks.
The area to the east and south is Warsaw.
The sun is burning out and shining through the dust.
The river is invisible, our house was built by little ants.
It’s freezing and almost dark, white figures return to their homes.
The buses can hardly move —
at home dogs have had a hard day.
Although the poem then ends in a contortion towards flat, wannabe epiphany, banging us over the head with “Today, just as before, there are redundant people./Yet each of them can do a lot and each can bear a lot”, it does bring us to that subjective-objective brink where the arrangement of fact creates unstated feeling — isolation, hope, haunting, comfort, weariness.
Let’s end with a slice of the collection’s very first poem, “Morning on Earth”, where Sommer’s mode and tone are set:
Here’s
the electric company guy I like,
and no sign of the gas guy
I can’t stand.
And all of a sudden two Misters M. –
one I’ve fallen for, the other
a bit of a hotshot —
coming back, both nine years old,
just passing the jasmine bush,
a huge bouquet of stick.
Behind the door
the dog’s excited, nothing
at odds with anything.
Quietly hell-bent on observation becoming subtle revelation, he is gonna damn well track the everyday-eternal thread, making what passes along from moment to moment a poetic meditation, a reporterly record of the day to day wrestling with the world and the self, with beauty, with mortality, with peace — all this through poems that seem like pleasantly surprising errands. Sommer’s work is a way of engaging life — in a manner not unlike most of ours.