Now The Winter Sex of Our Discontent, or, Do
Schools of Poetry Still Matter?
Winter Sex
Katy Lederer
Verse Press, 2002
Such might be the thoughts of a skeptic in the bookstore:
"Oh no, not another 'I graduated from Iowa and moved to New York
or San Francisco' first book of poems—more polished than provocative,
more emo than punk, more neo than new, more filtered Heidegger than
straight-up Marx, more James Tate than James Tate, less Ashbery than
Ashbery, too cool for school, out Jorie-ing Jorie in the recuperation
business, straddling the fence (read Fence) but not suffering the
bodily consequences… Ladies and gentlemen, we have a new genre
of American poetry born out of the poetry wars: from the no-man's
land between the avant-garde and the rear-guard, we have a movement
born against most of what has been taught in the Iowa tradition, the
New Iowanism—or, as Cal Bedient lewdly calls it, 'soft-core avant-gardism.'"
Katy Lederer is a fine poet, and it is impolite and somewhat unfair
to begin a review of her nuanced and genuinely new Winter Sex by situating
it within the institutional contexts of American poetry—but the
reality is that poets come to us with brand names, allegiances, implications,
compromises built into the books they publish and the blurbs which
adorn them. Everything about the way that contemporary poetry is taught,
published, marketed, and read (or overwhelmingly not read) in American
culture suggests that contrary to what Horace thought, poets are not
born but made. We hardly need Pierre Bourdieu to tell us that there
is no tabula rasa for either the reader or writer of contemporary
poetry—every time we pick up book of poetry an act of selbstüberwindung
(self-overcoming) is required so that a reader can grant a writer
some small measure of imaginative autonomy from institutional considerations.
The New Iowanism may represent the most serious challenge from within
yet mounted against workshop culture-its most prominent representatives
(Mark Levine, Joshua Clover, Geoffrey G. O'Brien, Rebecca Wolff, Matthew
Rohrer) have learned a good deal from Language poetry, and knowing
many of their workshop teachers' opinions (or generalized repression)
of the hated and feared Language writers, the New Iowans have largely
refrained from joining in the Hundred Years War that has raged within
American poetic culture. More elliptical than the New Ellipticals,
not William F. Buckley Jr. meets Harold Bloom like the New Formalists
(dear reviewer, tell us what you really think), the New Iowans have
avoided making large claims for their poetry, and like their workshop
forebears they have also avoided writing much in the way of criticism.
The non serviam of the New Iowans is an implicit one. In contrast
to the Language poets, there are few direct references to the critiques
of subjectivity, culture, and communication (by such familiar figures
as Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Foucault) which have affected
virtually every area of the humanities, except perhaps for the strange
anachronistic preserve of the Romantic ego within the poetry workshop.
The New Iowans may not be so confrontational as their Language poetry
counterparts, and they may not be lining up the heavy hitters of philosophy
for their team, but they are unmistakably familiar with what is most
radical in both intellectual and popular culture, and they are not
writing lyric crisis poems. Iowa has surely produced more prize-winning
books of poetry than other writing school-it also produced writers
like Bob Grenier and Bob Perelman. The New Iowans are not alone among
American poets under forty who now believe that the factionalism in
American poetry is no longer a problem. Some of the New Buffaloans
and New Brownians seem to feel the same way. But one wonders if the
new non-factional, non-ideological, kinder, gentler poetry world will
be a world of even further diminished expectations for poetry-in terms
of political commitment and in terms of linguistic innovation.
The New Iowans in the long run may transform workshop poetry, and
if they do it will be by means of subtle subversion. The question
is whether subtle subversion is still subversion. In the world of
American poetry, (which is dependent on American higher education
to a greater extent than perhaps any other creative genre) subtle
subversion may be as effective as open warfare. Katy Lederer's Winter
Sex is a subtle book, studied in its wanderings, controlled in its
effusions, not likely to offend anyone to the left of Genghis Khan
or William Logan. Living in a country where George W. Bush is president
and Billy Collins is poet laureate has redefined our conceptions of
tragedy, of farce, and of the surreal. The tragic, the farcical, and
the surreal are all represented here, and in the most difficult of
ways: intelligently. The book is alternatively gentle and violent-sexuality
here is represented as tender in a poem like "In Brooklyn"
and brutal in a poem like "The Epithet Epic." The bluntness
of the book's title is a warning of the juxtapositions we are up for,
as in these metaphysical conceit laden lines:
Command
for the truth is that skies as done masturbate lubed up 'gan sloshing
O arthritis in the stars signals messengers to flee flee
and no rhythms to it, nothing to it but quick snaps and wings
on feet. Strange in bed. Talked of a lot and beaten into their heads
that there is a deformity. It brings out my sympathy.
It is sad.
There is an unmistakable Steinian quality to the ending of this passage.
Lederer's lyricism is often punctuated with the tautological, the
truistic, the what-goes-without-saying, and the humility of Lederer's
quasi-conclusions can be a winning quality. The poems are often amped
to the point that the filament in them appears ready to burn, and
then at the last second Lederer seems to know how to reduce the current
without losing the illumination. The studied emptiness characteristic
of Michael Palmer or Fanny Howe doesn't always work, however, as in
a poem like "Untitled," which ends:
Lodged in strict formation
we
are diffuse,
and so we wonder
what
we are.
Yes, "we wonder/ what we are." So? On to the next poem…
The best poems in the book, like "Dulcinea," "An Interrupted
Question," "Remedy," "Around a White Orchard,
a Frame" have an almost Jabèsian quality to them: patiently,
forcefully resisting simplification as mere superficiality. Lederer
has the rare talent of knowing how to write projectively when she
wants to, and for placing words in the right spots on the page, as
in "Remedy":
Put shit in a jar
Restore
it—
the barren Will
Find
its remedy in the half-contained
jewel
box
With four of your fingers
the
jar to your mouth—
Hot water and rose petals
adjudicating—
you
will have to own up
to
this.
And the poem ends:
The
madrigal song
of
renewal
will
lease out your heart to your body—
and
your soul will
solicit
your soul
On the Romantic side perhaps, almost Duncan-esque—but very typically
well-executed and smart.
One small qualm: the book is divided into four sections for no apparent
reason. This is almost a cliché of first poetry books-a quick
survey in the bookstore will prove this. A friend of mine had a prominent
poet tell her in class that all poetry manuscripts should be divided
into three or four sections so that they look more professional and
polished to publishers. Why waste the paper? How about eight extra
pages of poems instead?
Such a qualm is entirely moot under the circumstances of so fine a
book as this—subtly subversive or not, as the case may be. In
the best New Iowan style, there is something here for the softcore
and the hardcore fan base. Books like this require a readjustment
of many of our assumptions about the schools and traditions of American
poetry. There is a growing quantity of well-packaged New Iowan material,
and it is becoming more difficult to differentiate the poets from
one another—Katy Lederer will remain distinct.
To quote from the poem "In Las Vegas": "I read things
that make me jealous."
True that.
