| | | Bluestones and Salt Hay
An Anthology of Contemporary New Jersey Poets edited by Joel Lewis, Rutgers University Press, 1990, 236 pages, $11.95, paper
More than an anthology that characterizes a particular region, this book is valuable and fun as a collection of new poetry whose boundaries can't be contained within state lines. In attempting to represent the demographics of a geographical area that covers as much ground as New Jersey, the triumph of this book's editing is its inclusion of voices unrepresented before. "The afternoon is ablaze with ordinary people," as Stephen Dunn of Port Republic puts it. To define a character for the Garden State, every layer of its panoramic fabric is exposed. The sweep is as all-inclusive as the state's most famous poem, Paterson. I'm not sure any clear personality emerges. What does come across is the great variousness. There's the mix of the placid rural life: grandpa on the porch, crows and magnolia trees, bread cooling on the windowsill, and the more assaultive toxicity of the urban sprawl: "Ruptured auto husks/shotgun sprayed, rot/under billboards"—James Ruggia. Though most of the poems touch on descriptions of the pastoral or urban NJ landscape, there's still plenty of room for these poets to stretch out.
The book opens with a warm, welcoming preface by Anne Waldman and a fine introductory essay by Joel Lewis, which despite a few grand sweeping proclamations that offset the finely tuned particulars of the essay, nicely establishes both the breadth of seriousness and tone of liveliness to follow. The poetry begins, alphabetically by author, with a barrage from Amiri Baraka. Any expectations of a tame read the reader might have brought are immediately disrupted. We're engaged with the swiftness of Baraka's talk, a language so fast he speeds past closed parenthesis. The editor culls together a generous selection from Baraka's wide oeuvre—a hipster, Kerouac flavored poem, a black street talker, and an address/attack to the establishment: "bourgeois poets yodel nonsense about boring absence/they think up funny ways for letters to sit on the page/concrete bullshit, arty bullshit/they are safe as old toilet paper." So, conveniently, a challenge is laid out at the beginning to reorder your senses. Baraka's rallying cry and aggressive confrontation is incredibly persuasive in its force and sheer determinacy. I easily succumb to Baraka's fervent pitch against oppression and back his anger at the dumb way things keep remaining. But his aggressive attacks nix any chance for a dialogue. I don't like being told to fall into his paternalistic line though I always find myself applauding his efforts. He always changes the way I look at the world.
In a poem that begins with the time, location, destination and a weather report, Joseph Ceravolo frames his suburban existential blues on the early AM bus to NYC, job-seeking and weary: "I really do feel / like wandering off forever / and stop looking for anything/while the wind / carries away the smoke/from Hoffman LaRoche / Pharmaceuticals." It helps me to have aery thoughts placed in so specific a locale, cushioned by something familiar so there's something to grasp onto. I've passed by that plant on Route 3 hundreds of times so the hometown familiarity of that image is a pleasurable hit. But the objectivity, the naming of the specific, is there for anyone to grab hold of and feel. This poet's peculiar stripped down saintliness shines here. Ceravolo died last year and the anthology honors him by including poems from an unpublished manuscript.
To me the anthology's strongest point is the Berlin Wall of specialized interests crumbling to allow the richness and variousness of all voices. Whitman's (died Camden) dream of an inclusiveness to contain the multitudes is here. We're not just offered a polite slice of pretty voices to affirm one's habits as those of society's as a whole.
If the romance of Cheryl Clarke's black lesbian characters Althea and Flaxie is treated as a defiance to the locals in her poem, as it surely must have been for the thirty years the ballad covers, the poem's inclusion in this collection is an acceptance. The dignity the characters would be denied in their time is here welcomed and embraced as contributing to the cacophony of human respectability.
As he does so well, Allen Ginsberg (b. Paterson) makes history personal, recreating the scenario of how it was growing up in NJ: "It used to be farms/stone houses on green lawns ... The communists picnicked/amid spring's yellow forsythia/magnolia trees & apple blossoms . . ." The planet's most effective herald / minstrel broadcaster then brings things closer to the present: "Then came the mafia, alcohol / highways, garbage dumped in marshes, real / estate, World War II, money/flowed through Nutley, bulldozers. // Einstein invented atom bombs / in Princeton, television antennae sprung over West Orange ..." Allen avoids the rose-colored, sentimental look back, cutting right through to the state of the state message as felt and eyewitnessed, with exacting national detail ("Oldsmobiles past by in front of my eyeglasses") to make it vivid.
The poets herein aren't into making myths. They don't figure what doesn't fit their plot. They're realists and use the palette of the seen and encompassed. They're down to earth. There's meat on these poems. Ginsberg's game plan all along has been to use the local incident as descriptive of the collective. This graphic precision he picked up, of course, from the good Rutherford doctor/writer, William Carlos Williams (who supplied the intros to Allen's first two books). While the majority of this anthology follows this school—details offered generously to fill in the colors against which ruminations take off—it is Ginsberg's selection, even more than those poets much younger and closer to my generation, that connects me most feelingly to my own experience of growing up in NJ. Other poets spend time in the malls ("Their hands stroke the shiny synthetics, the soft wools"—Penny Harter), call down the particulars from their seats and streets ("a sky the color of glue"—Jim Handlin), but my complaint would be that something of my own growing up in the 50s and 60s—Eisenhower crewcut, Kennedy Camelot, Beatles/Dylan upshot, student revolution—gets passed by here. Ginsberg's catalog mention of Viet Nam is the only one in the book. The younger poets (30–40) seem to avoid dealing with the shared consciousness of these decades as if they hadn't come to terms with it. By finding a shared local identity I was hoping to able to link up to the larger national identity. Eliot Katz, in his prayer to Whitman, points out the horrors of the day ("Camden, New Jersey, once Garden State, / now world's cancer capital.") and Mark Hillringhouse can do the same: "winos asleep in their army coats / outside the Evergreen Liquor Store," but these affecting urban portraits don't satisfy my desire for the opened file, the personal investigation.
That's not to say that there isn't plenty of eloquence. The editor's preference leans away from that nostalgic and sentimental trip and towards the poet's immediate surroundings and situations. There are a few clunkers of the too academic, fitted, workshop exercise variety. Reading the bios in the back, I noticed that the poets with the most awards write the least interesting poems. But the majority of this book offers up generous helpings of many solid, delightful poets, 34 of them. In a bluesy poem, Pablo Medina soothes himself while inside "a landmark of grease / in the gut of Trenton," Sam's Deli on South Broad, where "you don't even get a napkin / with your hamburger," with his reverie of making love to a woman with his socks on. Or Elizabeth Anne Socolow's personal geography" "Here, people move quietly enough to respond // to a kitten strayed out from the barn." Two poets refer to Dina's bad back.
(Poetry Project Newsletter)
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