Dreams and Nightmares

BOTH AI and Gregory Orr were born in 1947. Aside from that they share little in common, except that they're both publishing their first books of poetry and both books are very good.

I FIRST came upon a style similar to Orr's while sitting in the waiting-room of a doctor's office. Appearing in the New Yorker was a single poem by Mark Strand called "The Room." It describes a place much like that waiting-room: antiseptic, empty, bereft of any outward emotion, full of silent anticipation. A sense of detachment in the short, simple lines emphasizes an underlying presence of death and sorrow. And Strand's dreamlike collection of everyday objects paradoxically works to produce a coherent poem. Orr's poetry used the same simplicity, the same etherial contrast of commonplace images amid stark, unencumbered language, but the effect is different, more diffuse.

Conveniently, Orr has also written a poem entitled "The Room." Since both poems are statements about poetry, the room being the poem, a comparison between the two can show how Orr departs from reality, and what makes that departure so attractive. As you "enter" Strand's "room," a strange one-sided dialogue ensues: he puts questions to you are thinking. While he recognizes his own place in the poem, he remains "at the back/of the room." The words themselves have to do the job of the poetry, to 'fit' the reader:

I am here. Can you see me?

I shall lay my words on the table

as if they were gloves,

as if nothing had happened.

In a mysterious way, something does happen. The idea of the poem as a room where the poet lingers but can never be fully seen sets just the right mood of alienation for its message. It's a simple statement, but what could not work well alone, comes off nicely here:

I know

if you close your eyes

you will know why

you are here;

that to stand in a space

is to forget time

that to forget time

is to forget death.

For all of its strangeness, Strand's room uses a poem about poetry effectively.

Poems about the writing of poems can be pretty unbearably self-indulgent or just plain dull. Strand makes you forget that, while Orr barely escapes the problem:

With crayons and pieces of paper, I entered the empty room.

I sat on the floor and drew pictures all day.

One day I held a picture against the bare wall:

it was a window. Climbing through,

I stood in a sloping field

at dusk. As I began walking, night settled

Far ahead in the valley, I saw the lights

of a village, and always at my back I felt

the white room swallowing what was passed.

This room is slightly more gimmicky than Strand's; it leads to another place in the same manner Alice's lookingglass does. And this "other" world is never complete in any of Orr's poems because he uses a number of recurring symbols, which only become complete over a series of poems. Even common phrases like "threading" one's way through trees takes on a new meaning when, in another poem, a man's life is a "skull of red yarn/that unravels as he walks," and in still another poem, "behind you the dream burns the empty nests,/and before you the day with its ball of twine."

Orr remains in a dream where Strand only uses its structure. Burning the Empty Nests shouldn't scare you away just because it has a "symbolic structure." Despite the volume's occasional unevenness, its only bad effect is the craving for more it leaves behind.

AI'S CRUELTY., on the other hand, leaves very little to the suggestiveness of poetry. Its titles speak for the poetry's overbearing directness: "Forty-Three Year Old Woman, Masturbating," "The Corpse Hauler's Elegy," "The Cripple," "The Suicide," "Child Beater," "Starvation." Ai's purpose seems to be to attack the reader, lash out at the finer sensibilities. Her poems are description of desperate people or small narratives laced with hate and anger. There isn't even any self-pity in her characters--in "The Rivals," an old woman screams out at her cold husband:

Just try it. Fall! I don't give a damn.

You're hurting, so am I,

but I'm strong enough to let you cry alone.

The only laughter here comes screaming out at you like wild hyenas, as in this segment from "Why Can't I Leave You?":

come close between my legs

and let me laugh for you from my second mouth.

In Ai's world there are no redeeming experiences, with one exception, death. There is a stoicism here, an unexplainable will to live. Only her last poem, "New Crops for a Free Man," hints vaguely of some kind of earthly salvation.

There's no excess baggage in Cruelty's lines. If anything, there's a lack of finesse--subtlty could get across some of Ai's scenarios even more powerfully than the raw, hard-hitting stuff that leaves you numb and bewildered.

When Ai came to Harvard last fall for a reading at the Advocate she said as a preface to her new book that you have to go through hell before you can reach heaven, you have to experience pain and hate before you can truly enjoy pleasure or love. Whatever her plans for the future may be, it's certain that at the present time Ai has not yet transcended into that state of higher being. This lady is living in hell.