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Poets—like diplomats—know what not to say. There is none more reticent than the true poet.
This is all the more remarkable to say, given that a poem (unlike most persons) is a person with his whole being talking.
This is not a metaphor; if you read a letter from your lover saying they are leaving you (for instance) when you are reading that letter, that letter is your lover. A poem is a talking person. No more, no less.
If ‘a person with his whole being talking’ is what a poem really is, how is one reticent in it?
It’s impossible to be reticent in it. We can use words like “pure” and “art,” but we cannot reconcile the two truths we have just posited.
It is difficult to read an excellent book of poetry in one sitting—is one supposed to do such a thing? When I finished Ben Mazer’s The Hierarchy of the Pavilions (Madhat Press) the idea which came to me was “the inevitability of chance.”
Ben Mazer’s poetry has no rules; it does exactly what it wants, and yet it is reticent to a degree unparalleled in the history of letters.
I am a poet less skilled than Mazer; it could help if I compare myself to him, and show you, in my role as a critic and poet, how extraordinary Mazer as a poet is. Here is a poem I wrote:
WHY DIDN’T YOU LET ME LOVE YOU?
I guess it was my fault. I went off to write my poems
Inspired by you, but since I’m not a portrait painter
You didn’t think you needed to be there. In my mind
You were fine and gradually you weren’t there at all.
My poems were the last to notice; they became so good
They brought you back more real than you had been
When you were here. And we laughed and sighed in our sin.
The lonely make the best poets; my desire for you
Wrote the poems; having you, did not. Simple painting
Would have solved everything. Poetry is more complex.
As for you, let me guess:
You woke up one day and realized: poets love us less.
Poetry doesn’t care that people are apart.
It’s true, Rosalinda. Poetry lives only in my heart.
I wrote this poem, obviously, with “something to say.” “Why Didn’t You Let Me Love You?” is not reticent at all. It explains its head off, and this is its weakness, in terms of art. One can see that writing a poem like this starts with a clear idea, in which one person is talking to another. Formally, the rhymes are intrusive. There is really no poetry here. It is nice talk, but that’s all it really is.
But here is Ben Mazer.
It rains. One steps up through the haze is the first poem in The Hierarchy of the Pavilions, and here it is in its entirety:
It rains. One steps up through the haze
of tan and violet to the maze
of memory—misty where one stands,
twisting, separating strands.
The hour’s dim, and no one calls;
obligation mutely falls
through floors of mountains, origin:
anonymously you begin.
The blasted lantern of the nerves
lights up the sky, where starlight curves;
below, on earth, some few pass by
sheer constructs of identity.
They swirl and plaster every sense,
unto a law of difference:
not clear how long, or what direction,
subsume the nerves in their inspection.
The skeleton’s examination
evokes, incites, brief procreation:
filed away, some future date
astonished memories locate.
The seraphs of pedestrians
seep into violets, into tans,
breaching desire’s boulevards;
throw down the last of evening’s cards.
There is no way to formulate
identity’s raw nervous state:
it seems to slip into the world,
by stellar facts and atoms hurled
into the mythic stratosphere.
Ideas formulate the seer.
Genesis sans generation.
A change of trains at London station.
Every phrase, “It rains,” every line, to the final “A change of trains at London station,” every word here—is poetry, and poetry of the highest order. It is not someone talking. It is a spell. As Philip Nikolayev says in his brilliant afterword, “We are as if beckoned to step out of whatever mental state we happen to be in—and into the rain.”
This is precisely it. We are taken out of our own “mental state” and into the poem’s—which, although it uses words, is not like the talking which goes on around us, or in our heads every day. It is a “mental state” produced by every rhythm, every sound, every shard and nerve of the poem’s language which fulfills the impossible prophecy—Ben Mazer’s poem is talking; sure, it’s a person—but it is reticent. It is art.
To quote Nikolayev again:
Identities that seem definite and self-determined are “sheer constructs,” illusions. The unfurling and dissipation of one’s identity is what constitutes one’s destiny, and Mazer’s poetry is very much a poetry of destiny. Luckily, a poet’s identity has a way of dissipating into poetry rather than into the stratosphere.
philip nikolayev. the hierarchy of the pavilions afterword
Once the abstract quest for identity has failed, we simply shake it off—as the dream and head trip and poem that it is—as we refocus our senses on something as concrete and contingent as a change of trains in a major European metropolis. The poem starts with one change of mental state and ends with another, setting the tone for the whole collection, which comprises a large percolation of mental states. The poem’s London is the London of the poet’s personal experience, but it also stands for the context of English poetry, important to him.
Ben Mazer stands at the center of English poetry—all poets of Mazer’s stature writing in English cannot help but be both American and British poets—and poets of the world as much as the best translations permit. That he is a scholar, as well, is a given—one cannot do in poetry what Mazer does in poetry without swimming in it.
The paradox of poetry without personhood I am chewing on can be illustrated by Mazer’s own words from his “The Foundations of Poetry Mathematics,” a series of metaphysical propositions, blessedly included in The Hierarchy of the Pavilions—making this volume even more indispensable:
“2.23. God gives and takes away. What He gives is poetry, what He takes away is the poet.”
The poet knows he doesn’t count—but his poetry does. This may be wrong, but it is the only way to write great poetry; or at least Mazer makes it seem so—for himself, if not the rest of us.
As a scholar, Mazer is singularly pure, just as he is in his poetry. He doesn’t divide himself; he doesn’t take sides in effusive but finally useless debates. His peerless focus on what’s important is demonstrated effortlessly by another gem from “The Foundations of Poetry Mathematics”—this assaulted my eye, lying near to its brother above:
“2.18. “Traditional” and “avant-garde” are interchangeable terms referring to formal mastery of the range of available techniques (including the not yet articulated).”
Mazer cannot be argued with—he will not argue, aesthetically, about “traditional” vs. “avant-garde” but defend both as “formal mastery,” and who but a truculent blowhard without discrimination or patience would disagree? And this is why his poetry stuns and weaves spells none can escape—he has studied and learned not to be argued with; there is no arguing with his pure poetic affect.
If this seems all too simple, well:
“2.20. The mature poet aspires to greater incomprehensibility and less complication.”
Look at this short poem, The black-gold wallpaper, which demonstrates “incomprehensibility” with “less complication,” a poem which says a great deal without really saying anything—just to briefly move in the book from what I could quote from all day (“The Foundations of Poetry Mathematics”) to the poetry:
The black-gold wallpaper,
the scarabs sealed in glass,
our beds set close apart,
how slow the hours pass,
in the great depths of night,
enclosed within the city,
I read from an old book,
with wonder and with pity.
The music is flawless.
Back to “The Foundations of Poetry Mathematics.” Here is another example of how Mazer’s paradoxical and ultimately triumphant mind works:
“2.39. Decisiveness. The same as decisions. If it is impossible to tell the number of these, literally impossible, because there are so many of them, then the poem is a job well done.”
And in this next one the impact is almost akin to hypnosis:
“2.49. Clouds do not have to be clouds. This is as simple an expression of number as I can think of.”
It’s not surprising that a mind like this will also produce, in another mood, humor, with the same singleness of purpose. Nothing stops Ben Mazer’s mind. The Hierarchy of the Pavilions features over 13 pages of something very funny, entitled, “The Magazine Review of Books.”
Ben Mazer writes pure poems “too deep for tears,” and these are almost too deep for laughter:
HELP ME OUT MAGAZINE
SAY THAT AGAIN MAGAZINE
EXCUSE ME MAGAZINE
THE WHY NOT REVIEW OF BOOKS
WANT ME MAGAZINE
ME TOO MAGAZINE
THE ME TOO REVIEW OF BOOKS
MANSTAND
THE TROUBLER
CONFLICT MAGAZINE
MARGERINE
TUNE ME OUT REVIEW OF BOOKS
MICHAEL MAGAZINE
THE HOWARD REVIEW
THE HOWARD REVIEW OF BOOKS
HOWARD MAGAZINE
JILL
BEGGAR MAGAZINE
LOOK OUT MAGAZINE
OFTEN MAGAZINE
CLAMP MAGAZINE
CLIVE REVIEW OF BOOKS
GLIMPSE MAGAZINE
MAKES NO DIFFERENCE MAGAZINE
BIG IDEAS
BOB
BEAR WITH ME REVIEW OF BOOKS
The list get increasingly crazier:
SHAKE MY BOTTLE REVIEW OF BOOKS
BRAIN POWER MAGAZINE
SECRET MEANINGS REVIEW OF BOOKS
NOT A MATTER FOR SPECULATION MAGAZINE
and crazier:
YOU MAY NOT BE GETTING IT REVIEW OF BOOKS
I TOLD YOU BUT YOU DIDN’T LISTEN MAGAZINE
I’M GIVING YOU ANOTHER CHANCE MAGAZINE
I NEVER GET PIMPLES I CAN’T BELIEVE IT MAGAZINE
and crazier:
THIS FEELS FINE I FEEL REALLY GOOD FOR SAYING ALL THIS REVIEW OF BOOKS
PLEASE DON’T HATE ME OR JUDGE ME TOO QUICKLY MAGAZINE
I’M REALLY YOUR FRIEND THAT IS IF YOU’RE NOT A MEAN PERSON REVIEW OF BOOKS
ending after 13 pages, with:
THINK IT OVER CAREFULLY THINK IT OVER CAREFULLY THINK IT OVER CAREFULLY THINK IT OVER CAREFULLY MAGAZINE
JUST LET IT COME TO YOU JUST LET IT COME TO YOU JUST LET IT COME TO YOU JUST LET IT COME TO YOU REVIEW OF BOOKS
THE ELBOW OF THE CHIN SMILES UPSIDE DOWN
I’ll close with a poem which hints at what poetry means for us:
SMOOTH AS A SILKEN BEE
Smooth as a silken bee you found that talk
came honeyed to your lips, the dropped leaflets
of cold war verse did more than just rehearse
the country gossip of another time.
First in milking, first in being read
to the old principal’s confirmed delight
till the days passed, and tall before the dean
you learned that you’d be given every chance,
so that even now you are self-chosen.
When the map wants to look you are the town.
A half a pint would get you half a poem
and one of ham and mustard get you one
so in the shuffle of the boys’ salon
under an optic tutelage by rote
you learned to put your claim upon the light,
translating it to mimicry of sound
just as you had when praying to the ground
in the morning light that knew no names for things
but that which, from the town, the father brings.
In poetry you found a foster home.
Ben Mazer is currently editing, under contract with both the Delmore Schwartz estate and Farrar Straus Giroux, the collected poems of Delmore Schwartz.
This is cause for celebration.
But I think it is tragic how few know how valuable this living poet is.