No Place in Nature

Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016. Frank Bidart. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017. 736 pp. $40.00 (cloth).

Like music, poetry—or at least our experience of it—is an art that unfolds over time. One cannot read every word in a poem at once, after all, and so readers must give themselves over to reading’s timeline. Without tools like composers’ strict tempo markers, poets don’t have absolute control over how long it takes to read a poem, but they can influence the way the poem plays out across the page and, therefore, the relative pace of the text’s arrival. Time reveals itself in poetry most obviously through the speed of information’s release: the denotative made known through the metric and the visual. Coleridge famously defined poetry as “the best words in the best order,” but “in the best format” acts as a useful addendum, particularly in the case of Frank Bidart. The best words in the best order in the best format can be thought of as a triangulation of time, a way to consider the poem as a controlled dynamic, where the poem opens, rather than stagnates, like a bloom in time lapse.

Author of nine collections of poetry, Bidart is one of our best living negotiators of poetic time, how the line and page bridle it or else let it run wild. His fidelity to an idiosyncratic voice, one that’s distinctly Bid- artian even when modulated by persona, relies upon dynamics—pace, pitch, and volume. His best poetry takes advantage of time’s nuances of rush and hesitation, the voice orchestrated toward drama through contrast, silences and shouts, quickness and trudge. Anyone who has ever heard Bidart read knows the intensity and intimacy he cultivates through oral delivery, the way he commands silences and insists upon the rhetoric of breath. Scored on the page as well, this craft is evident in profusion throughout his new collected works.

Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965–2016, winner of the 2017 National Book Award in poetry, begins with Bidart’s first collected works, In the Western Night: Poems 1965–90, which consists of the poet’s first three volumes bookended by sections of then-new poems. This is followed by later collections Desire (1997), Star Dust (2005), Watching the Spring Festival (2008), and Metaphysical Dog (2013), and the collection finally arrives at a section of new poems called “Thirst.” Initially, it may be di∞cult for some readers to engage with the chronology of Half-Light, given that the first poems one encounters are from well into the middle of the poet’s career. Without preface, introduction, or epigraph, Half- Light opens as In the Western Night did, with the invocatory “To the Dead,” an almost-dedication for the whole book, which begins:

What I hope (when I hope) is that we’ll see each other again,—
. . . and again reach the VEIN
in which we loved each other. . . It existed. It existed.
There is a NIGHT within the NIGHT,—

In its very first lines, the book begins to teach us how to read its poems by demonstrating some of Bidart’s values and obsessions as a poet (death, time, desire, loss) as well as some of his unique style (including statement requalification, compound punctuation, complex format- ting). If “What I hope” had not been qualified by “(when I hope),” the poem’s opening gesture would not have had so much depth; now we know that the speaker doesn’t always hope, that there are times when hope isn’t available to him. This situates the poem in time, even if in- distinctly so. Bidart is a poet of caveats and qualifications, of reiteration with nuance, so the fact that his collected works begins with a “this but only sometimes” gesture underscores his attention to the conditional and the circumstantial, the way that all assertions require temporal context. By allowing statements to be made and then qualified or negated, Bidart privileges a moment of utterance for each poem, creating space for the dramatic reprisal of the speaker’s real-time progression of thought. We see the technique of requalification or self-negation throughout Bidart’s work, including poems like “Ellen West” (“But then again I think, NO.”) and “The Second Hour of the Night” (“Ovid tells the tale:— / or, rather, Ovid tells us that // Orpheus sang it”). Each time this gesture appears, Bidart seems to forsake objective truth in favor of the autonomy (and intrigue) of subjective points of view.

Most famously, Bidart’s early poems “Herbert White,” with its persona of a necrophilic murderer, and “Ellen West,” which alternates between a monologue by the anorexic Ellen and the medical notes of her doctor, demonstrate just how far into a deeply subjective, even morally deranged or mentally unstable, perspective he’s willing to ven- ture. In these two oft-mentioned and anthologized poems, we find the personae denying their own bodies, actions, or identities: “somebody else did it, some bastard / had hurt a little girl,” says Herbert White, and Ellen West waxes lyrically about “the ideal / not to have a body.” These characters’ disavowal of self creates an extra tension within the form of the persona poem, a mode that (usually) necessitates the poet denying his or her own identity to assume another’s point of view.

Denial is integral to Bidart’s work—both as an obsession and a point of connection. “Queer,” from 2013’s Metaphysical Dog, opens with a section negotiating sexuality:

Lie to yourself about this and you will 
forever lie about everything.

Everybody already knows everything

so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.

But lie to yourself, what you will 

lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.

Self-denial is self-erasure, this poem argues. Elsewhere, the collection’s title poem, tucked deep in the book, beyond the six-hundred- page mark, elegizes an old friend, someone whom the speaker, as an undergraduate, “was madly in love with.” In this instance, the denial, particularly as it relates to the consummation of queer desire or its frank and open discussion, manifests as missed opportunity. The poem opens with a memory of the two men lying “in parallel furrows” on the ground as they look at the stars, but it soon reveals that the friend’s wife has called to tell the speaker that his now-estranged friend died nine months ago. From this dramatic moment, the speaker’s voice launches into apostrophe, invoking the friend by name:

Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter 
threat we cannot ever have

the conversation that in
nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.

The speaker regrets not telling the friend how he once felt about him, eliding the possibility that the unrequitedness of the love may have been the very thing that sustained it, even after all those years, and thus motivated the address. He then fantasizes about a conversation the two might have had as “broken-down old men,” or still might have, in some other world or afterlife:

you say you
knew. I say I knew you

knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.

Bidart concerns himself with—indeed, obsesses over—the intersection between what happened and what could have happened, often seeming to entertain and reject a hypothesis simultaneously. “There was no place in nature we could meet,” the friend (or, rather, the poet playacting as the friend) says, and yet, the poem itself becomes the place in which the two can meet; it is a queer(ed) time and place, one that destabilizes reality so that it might cultivate its own.

We see this move as well in the poem that precedes “Half-Light,” “Old and Young,” in which the speaker has a conversation with a much- younger man, whom he obviously desires, as they both look at the same long dressing-room mirror:

THIS IS THE PLACE IN 
NATURE
WE CAN MEET

space which every other
space merely approximates

The mirror here seems to refract reality, even bend it, allowing for desire to coexist with its fulfillment. Bidart makes a space in which reality and unreality can inhabit the same poem, especially as they relate to discussions of queer sexuality and desire.

Much of his early work focuses on families, the deep-bruising trau- mas they inflict, the questions of identity they raise. In “Confessional,” the speaker recounts his relationship with his mentally unstable mother who, among other things, hanged his cat, the first episode in a string of traumas. This poem demonstrates Bidart’s skill with statement rather than image. A few pages into the poem, he writes of the mother:

She was SORRY. She tried
to change. . .

She loved me. She was generous.

I pretended
that I had forgiven her—;

                                              and she pretended

to believe it,—

she needed desperately to believe it. . .

SHE KNEW I COULD BARELY STAND TO BE AROUND HER.

Bidart builds his poems around the voice, in intimate delivery, con- trolled as if by stage directions through lineation and stylization (italics, all-caps) of the typeface, as well as idiosyncratic punctuation, including the dash/semicolon and comma/dash combinations. A whole disserta- tion could be written on Bidart’s use of punctuation and design, the way he alludes to and honors the history of textual experimentation. Many of his poems read more like scripts, with vocal dynamics rendered through the text’s formatting.

1997’s Desire marks a shift in Bidart’s work. The collection features the characteristically long poem “The Second Hour of the Night” but otherwise relies upon short poems and loose translations. In the book’s first section, we have an excerpt from Dante’s Vita Nuova addressed “To all those driven berserk or humanized by love” and a fragment of Catullus:

I hate and—love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified.

Desire contains denial contains desire, as love contains hate contains love. Polarities exist in tandem with one another, not at odds.

Desire also finds Bidart working with a new tone. There’s a feeling of surrender to circumstance and emotion in these poems—“May I be made into the vessel of that which / must be made,” he writes in “As the Eye to the Sun”—and, as such, they feel less tortured as they arrive line by line, as if stabilized (or triangulated) by their long view of history and literature. In “Borges and I,” a prose poem titled after Borges’s work of the same name, Bidart takes issue with the subdivision of the Argentine writer’s identity into the writer-self and the lived-self, saying that that idea “is seductive and even oddly comforting, but, I think, false.” Then he reflects on his own work and considers himself, his “I” in relation to it:

The notion that Frank has a self that has remained the same and that knows what it would be if its writing self did not exist—like all asser- tions about the systems that hold sway beneath the moon, the opposite of this seems to me to be true, as true.

Frank has been the same in all his poems, and he has not been the same in all his poems. As Bidart explores this notion, his third-person self is evasive: “But Frank had the illusion that his poems also had cruelly replaced his past.” The poems revised, perhaps even erased the past through their telling of it, thereby absorbing the Frank that the poet- Frank was. However, as its meditation continues, the poem becomes a renewal of spirit, a reclamation of self, body, and poetry.

In an essay for Salmagundi about his teacher Robert Lowell, Bid- art says, “One of the great subjects of poetry is whether poetry itself is possible.” His 2005 collection Star Dust has this investigation at its heart. “There is something missing in our definition, vision, of a human being: the need to make,” he writes in “Advice to the Players,” an aphoristic prose poem in sections. “Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.” Compare this moment to the invocation at the end of “Lament for the Makers”: “Teach me, masters who by making were / remade, your art.” The act of making a poem allows us insight into—indeed, makes us—who we are, Bidart seems to argue. Star Dust con- cerns itself equally with creation and destruction, by different makers and destroyers: emperors, lovers, musicians, soldiers, investors, and others. “The Third Hour of the Night,” which ends this collection, finds the speaker looking in the mirror, a space that, for Bidart, seems a place for making rather than reflecting:

Infinite the forms, finite
tonight as I find again in the mirror the familiar appeaseless 

eater’s face

[ . . . ]

You must fashion out of the corruptible
body a new body good to eat a thousand years

One makes the body through eating, through consuming; this, the grotesque but necessary—an apt description for much of Bidart’s work, which makes poems as it uses up the material of his life.

His two most recent collections, 2008’s Watching the Spring Festival

and 2013’s Metaphysical Dog, offer two distinct projects, both conversant with earlier work but refined by time: for the latter, a meditative and, at times, pastoral lyricism influenced by Western and Chinese classical traditions, and for the former, a reckoning with memory that intersects with art-making and an appreciation of pop culture. In the following, from Metaphysical Dog, Bidart ruminates on the act of writing, as if in sequel to Star Dust, while also considering his younger self, as he did in Desire’s “Borges and I”:

Writing “Ellen West”

was exorcism.

•

Exorcism, of that thing within Frank that wanted, after his mother’s death, to die.

•

Inside him was that thing that he must expel from him to live.

In this late poem, Bidart becomes his own literary critic, recognizing and even psychoanalyzing his autobiographical motivations, reclaiming ownership of them by revisiting them. At the end of “Writing ‘Ellen West,’” he gives himself something like a gift: “One more poem, one more book in which you figure out how to make something out of not knowing enough.”

Is this how we are to view Bidart’s poetry—the yield of making something out of not knowing enough, as he says? If that’s the case, then readers of Bidart’s Half-Life should think of the collection as a space of uncertainty, of flux, where we see the traces of a mind revolting against the body, the body against the mind. Urgency—of desire, of inner conflict, of the moment—is the prime agitator, sustaining Bidart’s work even across seven hundred pages, each poem fraught and immediate, from the first to the last.

Read more from Issue 15.1.