Ray McDaniel Reviews Gabriel Gudding's A Defense of Poetry

I can hardly blame Gabriel Gudding for his apparent desire to fart in the paper cathedral of contemporary letters. And I think it’s fairly beyond doubt that such scatological whimsy is essential to his sentiments; A Defense of Poetry contains no fewer than twenty-two references to matters bottomish. Sometimes foregrounded (“Poem Imploring the Return of My Butt”, “On the Rectum of Peacocks”, “My Buttocks”), sometimes mere gilding and garnish, the anus, the rectum, the butt, the buttocks, and all that issues thereforth are Gudding’s limitless source of inspiration. This is the poetry of scatological exhaustion; it is scatological-categorical. It is going too far, perhaps, to accuse Mr. Gudding of playing in his own shit; he is more concerned with the airier pronouncements likely to manifest from his very own region of unlikeness. The question then becomes one of whether his efforts and blastings offer delights to the reader as conspicuous as those clearly experienced by Mr. Gudding himself.

The answer is, if provisionally, yes. I demand the provision because it strikes me as impossible that any reader, no matter how predisposed to hysteria, no matter how subject to the novelty value of the word potty, could possibly compete with Gudding’s giddiness. It did prove infectious after awhile, though the vectors through which it was transmitted sometimes had more to do with force than nuance: Gudding is restless, unforgiving, positively juvenile in his refusal to abandon a joke. I’m still uncertain if he knows what purpose jokes serve, but I suspect he does, and there are moments in A Defense of Poetry (the title poem, “Infantry”, “Poems”, “The Lyric”) in which it becomes apparent that there are knives lurking behind Gudding’s smiles. He savors satire, and has a gift for it, but his realization of satire’s function—to simultaneously offend and defend, to indict a failure while exalting that which has been failed—is complicated not only by the range of what he has determined to satirize, but also by the risks concomitant with the use of wit in contemporary poetry. No, scratch that; I cannot imagine any poet who would be willing to renounce their use of, or access to, their alleged wit; this is really about being funny, which Gudding undeniably is, and what that means. In any case, Gudding is fighting on two fronts: he opposes the sacred self-regard with which much poetry is soiled, but willingly or unwillingly he must also contend with the possible consequences of freighting to and fro a sensibility that only appears to be light.

Readers who are less than attentive, or those whose ears are imperfectly tuned, may consign Gudding to that realm of the fatally affable in which one can find Dean Young and Tony Hoagland and, currently lording over the lot of them, the inexplicably persistent presence of Billy Collins. Each of these three has responded, in similar ways, to the same climate of tone-inflation that has so clearly activated Gudding’s impishness. But it is a profound mistake to identify Gudding with either this group or their noisome legion of imitators. The first essential difference is one of animation, muscle of line—the abovementioned three often adopt a toe-scuffing disingenuousness, a manner of false and baffled simplicity that, I think, masks a profound viciousness. They remind me of the frequency with which some bald men mock their own lack of hair; the redundancy of their self-ridicule cannot disguise the fact that they are jealous of those upon whom nature has gazed with greater affection. Indeed, their consistent protestations that such concerns are essentially foolish only work to reveal the degree to which they are themselves consumed by those concerns; they are “jus’ folks” whose assumed common-man status indulges a paradoxical, prosaic elitism.

Gudding escapes this trap admirably; he is a different, altogether more serious (though more successfully funny) citizen of poetry. Part of his distinction can be attributed to his charmingly naked auto-curiosity: in “My Buttocks”, he ratchets down his rhetoric long enough to note that

I am very interested in my buttocks,

because it is the part of my body I most infrequently see.

You might argue that if I were really interested in my buttocks

I would use mirrors and look at it more often.

But I reject that theory.

I am at once plainly interested in my buttocks,

at the same time that I look at it about once a year.

From there, Gudding commences to consider hermaphroditic replacements for the buttock-burdened form with which we are more familiar; this leap from the mundane to a pleasingly perverse speculation is one of Gudding’s signature styles and one of his more charming. He refuses to credit his own absurdity and is equally unwilling to abandon it; this equanimity often leads him in intriguing directions, though “My Buttocks”, as do a few other of the poems, ends when the poet’s sense of intrigue seems to wear thin. The effect of this is sometimes jarring but not always unpleasant; I respect a poet who quits a poem when they become bored with it, rather than waiting for me to suffer through that unfortunate work for them.

A Defense of Poetry also benefits from Gudding’s erudition and, more importantly, his ability to make excellent use of it without feeling a need to cloak or overestimate its utility. In “For Quintus Laberius Durus, Who, Because of a Javelin in His Lungs, Died Near Kent, in Early August, 54 B.C.” Gudding drolly begins with

Bored and nosing again in Caesar’s Gallic Wars

and feeling arrogant as usual about knowing Latin,

but commences to abandon almost immediately all traces of auctorial self-reference. What could have easily become a precious example of how to earn praise by appearing pathetic becomes, instead, a moving account of the futility of reading, especially the reading of history, which allows our editorial asides but can never address them. As an explicit theme, such a truth could easily become ponderous; Gudding manages its weight by sacrificing all possibility of his narrator’s self-chosen humility. Here, the poet knows that the admixture of literacy, curiosity and compassion is assurance of humiliations aplenty.

What I particularly enjoy about this technique is that it inoculates Gudding from a condition of perpetual swoon; he is rarely betrayed by his overwhelming catalogue of references and sub-references. Nothing that might obviously merit special treatment here receives it: in the poem “Richard Wilbur”, the eponymous poet is simultaneously lampooned and appreciated (“Richard Wilbur, you are my mind!”), a contradictory feat made exclusively possible by virtue of Gudding’s willingness to absorb material with undifferentiated appetite. He is in love with everything equally, equally irritated by all he has consumed.

When I consider this voracity, Gudding’s anal delight seems more a kind of awesome democracy than the pranksterism by which it inaugurates itself. Although “Fons Belli” is uncharacteristically slight for this collection, it does feature the useful if somewhat disconcerting conceit of the poet pulling impossible items quite literally from his ass; or perhaps it is more precise to claim possible objects (siege engines, appropriately enough) from an impossible anus: tormentum, robinet, fundibulum, martinet, bricole and finally a 50 foot trebuchet are all summoned from Gudding’s fund. As this partial list indicates, the one feature of the world upon which the poet is compelled to lavish disproportionate attention is its host of sounds: Gudding is delirious with word-love, and his fidelity to rhyme is not limited to aural affiliation—he rhymes cultural associations with the zeal of one obsessively compelled. To read poems such as “To an Oklahoma in Winter” is to host a whirlwind:

For your displacement

For the beaver and plover and swan

shot in the hips

for your highways your hard dawn

for your heartland

and Edward P. Murrah

for your fat dam on the Pensacola and Verdigris

your Tenkiller Ferry

for your grim wine stuffed with mung beans

your weird-headed murderess those half-wits

your coalman peppered at noon

Custer and Kiowa your Greer your seacloud skewered

over Ellis Okfuskee Adair

There is something heartbreaking about this excess, some sense, in the midst of biblical incantations and Christopher Smart and Gerard Manley Hopkins, that the poet’s rage and frustration at the multiplicity and chicanery of the world has been distilled to this one defense—to fling into a gale of insanity a tightly-wound tornado of righteousness. This strategy finds its ultimate expression in the last poem of the collection, “Requiem Cadenza”, a construction of such surpassing vigor and passion that it demands to be read aloud, repeatedly, and with the fury and legitimate woe with which it is bound.

I wonder, of course, what Gudding will do now, having established himself as such a homunculus. Like all satirists, he must return to the material the betrayal of which so sharpened his tongue and his sensibilities. I do not doubt his ability: “One Petition Lofted into the Ginkgkos” ends as follows

Imagine it all falling

into some dark machine

brimming with nurses

nutrices ex machina —

and they blustering out

with juices and gauze, peaches and brushes,

to patch such dents and wounds.

This is lovely to hear and consider, and it allows a tenderness that in no way threatens the fierce effulgence of Gudding’s more common style. Indeed, the former depends upon the latter, and I anticipate the tango the two personae will dance in contest of occupation of the same poetic space in Gudding’s future work.

Do not be distracted (not too distracted) by Gudding’s inability to resist mooning you. He is just laboring to get your attention. He sometimes overplays his hand, but it is a strong hand and often a magnificent play; generous purpose informs the gesture, and when it is executed as faithfully as it is in “One Petition Lofted into the Ginkgkos”, it deserves to be met with equal faith.

 

COMMENTS:

 

Sean Thomas Dougherty January 4, 2003 at 2:13 am

Simply a great review that reads Gudding’s book with care, concern, and critical insight.

 

Tad Wojnicki January 4, 2003 at 2:39 am

Hi, Ray,

I need to tell you that I love your guts! This is a wonderful review, even though at times it’s a tad stilted from what feels like your eavesdropping on your own erudition…

What’s good about it, in my opinion, is your ability to appreciate a poet as nutty, as irreverent, and as iconoclastic as Gudding.

Too bad Hank Bukowski is dead… You’d have been a wonderfully sympathetic critic to him! Or, Albert Huffstatter… I hope you continue exposing–decently or indecently–those brazen-faced poets out there “shunned for deeds done.”

Cheers,
Tad

 

Bill Morrison January 4, 2003 at 2:44 pm

I was about ready to consider this another review elaborate about nothing that much to bother with but reading on, the poem excerpts are essential of course, realized Gabriel Gudding is something else again. Ass fetish or not.

 

Jasper Bernes January 5, 2003 at 10:32 am

A fine and sensitive review, certainly, even it is at times somewhat turgid and overwrought. My one qualm, however, is that Mr. McDaniel misses, I think, the tremendous and terrifying violence of this book and of Gudding’s sensibilities, farts and jokes and all. I plan to review this book myself, and will hopefully provide a parallax view by which we can understand its relationship, say, to violent video-games and the violence that is, unfortunately, not a game.

 

Gabe Gudding January 5, 2003 at 10:37 am

Congrats, Ray McDaniel, on a careful, judicious, and forceful review. I read it with a surprising, if not a surpassing!, amount of equanimity.

Though I do not of course see much of the book the way you do, you made me understand and credit your reading as plausible and useful, even in some ways rejuvenating my own sense of the work. And though, as you can probably imagine, it’s difficult for me to agree that “Fons Belli” is too slight for the volume (I have at times considered it the metaphorical heart of the book), it was especially heartening to me that the bottom-motif was not priggishly dismissed as potty-mouthedry or fetish but considered seriously in the light of its referents — as maybe a preposterous isthmus leading to a seldom visited region of purposeful metaphor, a region where cultural and aesthetic politics matter. And, too, the idea that the comic may be at once oppositional in its uses and concordant in its pleasures is something you touch upon nicely here.

Just one thing you may want to fix: the line from “One Petition” reads “nutrices ex machina,” not “nutrias,” a nutrix being a nurse. But, hey, what’s one typographical stump in your review’s otherwise excellent orchard…

Thanks for reading the book with care, and I appreciate too the favorable comments as well (though it’s more in my nature not to credit those!).

Warm regards,

Gabe Giddy, i mean Gudding

 

Kent Johnson January 7, 2003 at 12:00 pm

Gabe Gudding came to read in Freeport, Illinois, where I live. Most of the people in the audience were senior citizens, bussed in from a local home. Gudding read brilliantly, and my son and I laughed quite a lot. A man in a wheelchair soiled himself. Everyone seemed pleased by the event. I recommend A Defense of Poetry highly. And I can say that if you want a good reading in your home town, invite Gabe Gudding.

 

Christopher Davis February 18, 2003 at 11:34 am

Good review! It’s a parenthetical section of the piece, but I especially like the discuss of tone/attitude in Young/Hoagland/Collins.

 

Nick Carter September 15, 2003 at 4:12 pm

1) What can one say about this review aside from ‘deliciously delightful’: ‘buttock-burdened; sometimes mere gilding and garnish; matters bottomish.’ I’m ‘giggling gleefully like Gabriel Gudding eating pudding under a tree full of bees,’ as one might say. Placing Young and Hoagland in the same school as Collins, then hoisting them all next to Gudding so they could deservingly topple under his Zeus-like touch, was, what can I say, a stroke of genius. Don’t you think that the language poetry of Eliot, Ginsberg, Kunitz, and Jewel, and its falsified “everyman George W. Bush” voice, has gotten too much attention of late, as well? And what of Billy Corgan and the manuscript he’s been shopping around New York Cit-ay? When will contemporary poetry shift back into the Old Testament mode of the 50’s, with all its fist pounding and heart attack inducing, McCarthy hearing protesting, and fancy beard supporting? Robert Lowell shall rise again, I say, and aristocratic gentlepersons such as you and I will win poetry awards once more!

 

Liam Lenihan April 8, 2005 at 6:13 am

Novelty for novelty’s sake! Typical. I am interested in my arse indeed! This reviewer should read Luc Ferry’s superb book, Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age. In this work Ferry berates so-called avant-garde poets, artists etc. for isolating the public from art with their innovation-for-innovation’s sake approach to art. Modernism and postmodernism are now the orthodoxy they set out to undermine. The traditionalism of the traditionalists is more innovative than poets concerned, or more likely up, their own backsides.

 

Ravi Dhillon September 17, 2016 at 4:02 pm

Gudding’s “poetry” typifies the death of poetry as having any significance in a world where thinking people struggle to live lives that make a difference, that matter. It bolsters Dana Joia’s argument that contemporary poetry is written only for contemporary poets. What a sad state of affairs when we are reduced to calling this art.