Druthers

By the time we’ve finished page one of Jennifer Moxley’s Druthers, we’ve been introduced to three illustrious men: Robert Herrick and Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins (in the dedication) and Saint Jerome (in the first poem, “If a Lion Could Talk”). That’s two epicures and one ascetic, which suggests an old-fashioned moral dilemma: Are sensory pleasures to be indulged in or denied? Moxley is squarely on the side of pleasure. The book is a paean to the joys of the flesh, the eros of a long-partnered couple, the ear’s pull toward the music of verse, the delights of domesticity, even a seductive imaginary monster called the Penetralium.

But Jerome’s a fake. Yes, the poem refers to Jerome in his iconographic context, his “great denial,” perhaps as painted by Bernardino Pinturicchio in the fifteenth century: the gray-bearded saint half-naked, his lower body swaddled loosely in cloth, on his knees before a crucifix outside of his hermit’s cave, with his attribute, “[t]he dog-faced lion…/ rewarded each night / for his loyalty / with a bowl of kibble.” The PR lies, however, for Jerome actually spent his time in a plush library paid for by his “widow patron” whose daughter he condemned for her “crampy hungers.” Why the pretense?

Jerome gazed out

of the casement

at a beautiful scene […]

and chuckled

to himself, “No one

paints a saint

in a great library

built through the pilfer

of a pious widow’s gold.”

The poem finishes by making the connection to literary immortality explicit:

A scholar, he knew

that sainthood, just like

good translation,

requires a bit of

finger pointing,

and some ethically

questionable

sleight of hand.

Once deeper into the book, the reader sees that finger pointing manifesting as Moxley’s go-to gift for setting the foundation of her poems on an opposition or disagreement, and the sleight of hand as her always nimble formal and rhetorical fillips.

And so, with that wary warning, we proceed into a book that foregrounds pleasure, even happiness, flouting the default melancholy of poetry. Herrick’s “cleanly-Wantonnesse” is on smiling display. The book contains many love poems in which monogamous sex gets better and better, like “Blue Chirp”:

This moment trumps a thousandfold

Those chubby maiden days

Courting gloomy moodiness

Beneath Parisian gray.

And though I never tarried,

My rose was often plucked,

To tell it I was weary

No matter who I fucked.

But now I’m like that winter chirp

Defying all that’s mean.

I kiss my Heurtebise awake

And blow him in my dreams.

and “The Old Prick” (a Metaphysical-style double-entendre):

Youth-skewed Cupid, the little pain

We banished just like Bradstreet’s book,

Yet ere he went he lodged anew

The arrow’s deep affection.

 

Thus older Love feels much the same

As young love does, absent the doubt,

Instead of pain or please don’t go,

Sweet skill and satisfaction.

The rhyme and meter here are songlike and regular; as often there’s something a little askew, a bit of wabisabian hiccup, in her metric lines. Maybe surprisingly for a poet inspired by pleasure in the present moment, Moxley devours the past. While Herrick was noted for the simplicity of his diction and syntax as compared with some of his contemporaries, Moxley’s poems always (and uncharacteristically of most other poems written by her contemporaries) sound like they were fed by very old books; every poem, even every line, is an artifact, chiming with poetic tradition, the archaisms, the twisty sentences often seasoned with a soupçon of 1940s-ish slang. This is not borrowing, not remix, but a more transformative process, wherein the poet has so completely absorbed her influences and her predilections that she creates something that could only be hers, and only right now.

Complex ornamental language is used not only for semi-campy but dead earnest admiration of oldstyle beauty, not only for good mouth-feel, but as a way to thought. And the thought in these poems is usually in service of an argument. Moxley’s earliest published work revealed her enjoyment of using words to build impasto-like verse structures. Her more recent books, including Druthers, showcase her as a rhetorical poet, at her most energetic when arguing against a popular or conventional point of view.  “A Light Touch” frames a taste for retro-hetero male chivalry/dominance as a feminist choice, and “The Chip,” a sort of anti-“Daddy,” talks back to the Confessional agon: “But not every personal wound / is a world-historical disaster.” In a pair of twin-poems, the speaker argues for and against both “Happiness” and “Sadness,” and “Up to the Minute” takes issue with our enforced awareness of current catastrophe via access to technology, arguing instead for the importance of individual imagination:

Humans are lit up: we can know all and see everything,

Face the hatred and be mistaken for brave, raise our

Convulsive fist in an attempt to conform to new

Scales of violence reflected off these surfaces,

Distracting us from other worlds, inward, or yet begun.

Elsewhere, “I would rather the poem’s score / My ear imprison, then enumerate / The wrongs of late capitalism,” in defiance of the prevailing stream of poetic engagement, although her 2009 masterpiece Clampdown is absorbed not in enumeration but in struggle with exactly that political reality.

I know of no contemporary poet who so unblinkingly writes herself as part of the grand bardic tradition of English-language poetry, and who so often wonders in her writing about her own literary immortality. From “On Her Success,” which imagines future readers visiting her graveside:

[…] though in life I may have been

excluded from the highest echelons

of poetry, derelict in my courtship

of Lady Fortune, now from this

deep earth and from these lines,

and from any reverie they spark

in you, none can my spirit evict.

And in the last of four little quatrains titled “Druthers” (as in “If I had my druthers…” –– the term states a desire even while acknowledging probable frustration), the speaker asserts:

I would rather have the dead’s respect

Than all the laurels the living bestow,

A good hard cry swell up my eyes

Than a poetry prize my ego.

These are the kinds of bracing sentiments that most of Moxley’s peers avoid in their poems while their Twitter feeds seethe. So un-self-consciously conscious is the speaker of these poems of her place in authoritative tradition that I find myself reading each piece as an ars poetica, which is after all another kind of argument. This is most obvious in the expansive “The Honest Cook’s Insomnia,” in which the rules of good cooking can be applied to poetry (“Beware of trends and fashions, / yet open to new techniques.”).

The instabilities of the current intersection of poetry and social media make it impossible to predict any poet’s odds of lasting, but because her work (to take up the cooking metaphor) provides such abundant intellectual and aesthetic richness and sustenance, Moxley deserves to last as much as any contemporary poet. And if lastingness depends in some measure on the work’s ability to make us want (or need) to re-read, Moxley also qualifies: Some of the poems in Druthers resist my intelligence almost successfully, at least the first time through, and the possibility of that happening, the discovery of the tough nut, keeps me addicted to her writing. We are used to opacity in contemporary poetry that arises from a refusal to connect dots, but Moxley’s density comes from the intricate pile-on of knots of syntax and, therefore, of thought. We know that the argument, the thought, is there, is interesting, will be convincing, is unknottable if we bring to bear our best powers of reading and understanding.

Perhaps the most Moxley-esque gesture of the book comes in its final poem, “The Spark,” which explores its title conceit with Metaphysical layeredness and finesse. Lightnin’ Hopkins was renowned for his fingerstyle guitar technique which allowed him to play lead, bass, rhythm, and percussion at once. As a constructor of arguments, Moxley can touch many strings at once. “The Spark” begins as valediction:

I wrote this happiness myself.

I chose this man, this house, this cat.

I put my shadow twin

upstairs in the leaf of a

mediocre book I thought

never to open again. I felt grateful.

But the happy present leads to thoughts of the happy past: she recalls the many photo albums she has in storage, filled with “happy children / …[who] pitch tents, watch TV, / open presents and smile before / homemade birthday cakes,” and wonders “Had I known them? I knew / that I was not missing them / or missing out and thus my heart / was full.” Questioning the past leads to questioning the present, in the form of an imagined chemical explosion that might kill her beloveds and destroy her home. Finally, she questions the future with a scenario that isn’t as farfetched:

[…] should

neural plaques and tangles

knot my mind, my heart would

empty and all of this would

cease to be. I could not miss it,

nor even this, my spark.

The life spark of happiness, a chemical spark (within the mental spark of the poet’s imagination) that might destroy, the poetic spark that might be destroyed. It is a pleasure to follow the brisk trajectory of the poem, past, present, and future, deeply and conclusively thought-through in thirty-three quick lines. Druthers, a book that asserts the importance of the desire for happiness in many forms, ends with a not-so-simple truth, truly a last word of the argument that can’t be argued with.