Customer Reviews

A Defense Of Poetry (Pitt Poetry Series)

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1 star:		(5)

 

 

Perhaps the only more powerful person than Gabe Gudding in the international banking communities of Wall St., London, and Zurich is Greenspan. When Gabe Gudding decides to make a deal, the Fortune 500 feels the impact as if an earthquake hit. Politicians know not the mess with Gabe because he can break any one of them. However, Gabe's world changes when Robert Lowell enters his life.

Though seven decades younger than him, Gabe covets Robert like he has not desired any person or thing in years. Gabe treats his approach to Robert the way he handled a business deal using any means, including immoral to obtain his wants. He gains his inner secrets that he provides to a poetics professor he arranged for him to see. However, as he obsesses over him, Gabe's world begins to crash around him, leaving him with few options.

Defense of Poetry is an entertaining tale centering on the potential destructiveness of obsession. The story line is more of a character study than a thriller as Humpty Dumpy provides a deep look into Gabe and Robert's thought processes and inner gut emotions. Graphic sex scenes may turn off some readers, but add to the overall feel of the reader being an observer. Though the subplot involving the law and killers subtract from the tale by trying to twist it into a thriller, the obsession which is the main story line brilliantly works leading to a fabulous absorbing look at extreme behavior.

This is the funniest book of poems I've ever read, but it's much more than that. It's a Rubicon moment. Will poetry continue to be "ruled with the scepter of the dumb, the deaf, and the creepy," as Kenneth Koch once wrote, or is it time again to "Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" (Walt Whitman). If you want reassuring pablum, read Phil Levine and others so beloved by the timorous part-time teaching assistant from New Jersey. If you want the top of your head taken off, though, you want "A Defense of Poetry."

This book made me laugh so hard that my husband demanded I read great hunks of it aloud. Which I did, with pleasure, because Gabriel Gudding has a sensational ear. He has timing to die for. And the stuff he's going after -- rage, aggression, terror, stupidity -- is big game. I find it hard to overstate the sorts of claims that this book has made on my attention. In one reading, it became _the_ book I will look to as a touchstone and as crucial sustenance in an age of bombast and bushwhackery.

This is an essential book for any reader ready to dispense with the literary equivalent of Sominex in favor of expanding his or her sense of the possibilities for poetry. I commend Gabriel Gudding (whom I have never met) for writing it, and I greet him at the beginning of a brilliant career.

The title poem, "A Defense of Poetry," is one of the funniest, saddest, strangest and most inspired poems I have ever read. (Indeed, I see from the acknowledgements page that the poem is forthcoming in a Scribner anthology entitled _Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present_). The irreverence of many of the poems in the book is justified -- or excused -- by the sheer verbal brilliance and imaginative ingenuity of this poet. This is a highly learned writer. The book is just an imaginative tour de force. It reminds me of Stevens' _Harmonium_. The poems in this book are incredibly varied: they range from the formal and crafted to an almost avant-garde (and even whacked or disturbed) kind of poem. But each poem is marked by a peculiar mixture of intelligence, gravity, comedy, and emotion that I have never seen before. This book is going to change how we think about poetry -- and I look forward to more from this odd, new, and weirdly brilliant poet. -- Robert Dobei

Criticize these poems at all and you risk playing the straight man to a comedian who has already personally queued the laugh-track--this book's neat little trap. Despite the painful self- awareness, the calculated little jokes, the predictability--after about page 5--of a kind of mechanical and heavy-handed irreverence (Michael Moore, is that you?), many of these poems actually are sort of funny. I laughed (twice, I think) as I read this. As terrible and pointless as I think this book is, I don't really blame Gudding--who is a good writer, in a way--and whose problem is really that he has the skills, the education and the desire to write but nothing to write about and no ability or vision which would allow him to transcend the limitations of the imprint of his times. He's got all the correct attitudes--a hip irreverence, a leftist and reflexive agnosticism about any and all topics. He's basically the a victim of the ennui that afflicts almost all of his generation (with the exception of a few like Nick Flynn who actually subject themselves to the process of becoming poets--a discipline that somebody like Gudding would only find embarrassing, and also too much work). Lurking in Gudding's jokes are a bunch of boring academic lessons about what poetry is supposedly "for" now that it's not "for" what it used to be "for"---an obsession these days of a great many mediocre young poets who've spent their whole lives attending or teaching school. At least Gudding, unlike many of his contemporaries, can occasionally be funny. It's too bad, though, that this is how little we ask of our poets now that they ask so little of themselves.

When I buy a joke book, I want the jokes to be funny and these ones are. So this is a good joke book. But there's a point in a joke sometimes (and if you've ever seen a Jim Carrey movie, you'll know what I'm talking about) when you realize that the clown suddenly wants to be taken seriously, that he has a "serious message" and a heart dripping treacle. I find this disgusting. Very displeasing to both the eyes and the nose. It makes me want to take a shower. If Gudding wants to make jokes--fine, he's good at it. His poems are wonderfully naughty bathroom-stall graffiti. When he (or worse, readers) start to make claims for their importance as either thinking or art, then the joke's on them but nobody's laughing anymore. At this point I am tremendously bored by both these poems and their dorky Star-Trek grad school apologists. The indignant comparisons of academic credentials by previous posters--now that's funny.

Perhaps the only more powerful person than Gabe Gudding in the international banking communities of Wall St., London, and Zurich is Greenspan. When Gabe Gudding decides to make a deal, the Fortune 500 feels the impact as if an earthquake hit. Politicians know not the mess with Gabe because he can break any one of them. However, Gabe's world changes when Robert Lowell enters his life.

Though seven decades younger than him, Gabe covets Robert like he has not desired any person or thing in years. Gabe treats his approach to Robert the way he handled a business deal using any means, including immoral to obtain his wants. He gains his inner secrets that he provides to a poetics professor he arranged for him to see. However, as he obsesses over him, Gabe's world begins to crash around him, leaving him with few options.

Defense of Poetry is an entertaining tale centering on the potential destructiveness of obsession. The story line is more of a character study than a thriller as Humpty Dumpy provides a deep look into Gabe and Robert's thought processes and inner gut emotions. Graphic sex scenes may turn off some readers, but add to the overall feel of the reader being an observer. Though the subplot involving the law and killers subtract from the tale by trying to twist it into a thriller, the obsession which is the main story line brilliantly works leading to a fabulous absorbing look at extreme behavior.

If you happen to be serious (and by serious I don't mean "serious," I mean SERIOUS) fan of poetry, you have found the right book here. For far too long, modern poetry has been flaggelating itself like a monk with impure thoughts trying to bleed the depth and breath and pathetic pathos of human experience through a bloody back covered in sackcloth and .... Poetry has become rot. The stuff of the morbid Oprah novel and the goth band lyric. Well I am here to tell you that in 90 short pages, Gabriel Gudding has fixed all of that. Taken poetry back from the furrowed brow and placed the Grecian urn back on the mantle.
Sure, it is funny, which may offend "serious" minded individuals, but it is also witty and poignant and full of mirth and terror. Gudding turns a phrase like few I have experienced. His use of alliteration and imagery and even (gasp) words that rhyme is so adept that it makes even some of his less serious moments shine. Poets privately think of themselves as terribly clever, but Gudding has out-clevered us all. You may think that you are the frontrunner in the Kentucky Derby, but Gudding is already at home composting the floral horseshoe.
I got SUCH a kick out of this book. The first poem from which the book derives its name will hook you into continuing as it is the most viscious, visceral (not to mention outright funny) invective since Jesus lambasted the Pharasees in Matthew 23. This will move you to later and more epic themes like the hard fought battle with 9th century vikings entitled "How I Caught My Cold." Or the thrill of the unique sporting event known as "The Pallbearer Races." Or the terrible conflict between a mother duck and Humpty Dumpty entitled "Adolescence." Or the gasping horror of being chased down by the unstoppable "Coalman" over a stolen lantern. These are all longer pieces (usually two to four pages), but there are certainly shorter works here as well that smack just as true. "After Yeats" has been copied into my personal volume of favorite poetry.
The temptation, of course, is to start simply copying lines from the book to make you see how good it really is, but there isn't room for that here. You will have to mine the lines out for yourselves and share the best ones with whoever happens to be within reach as you are reading.
So have I gone a tad bit overboard in singing the praises of this thin blue volume. I certainly don't think so. For years, I have been slogging through copious amounts of heart-killing rather than heart-rending poetry while waiting for this exact experience. It is about flaming time!

Contrary to the reader below from San Diego, I don't find the book terrible
and pointless at all. I find it unusual and new and emotionally complex in
a way that, I think, is going to threaten some readers, like the
vituperative and somewhat reactionary readers from New Jersey and San Diego
who seem bent on ad hominem, bent on attacking the poet. It's interesting
that the reader below makes claims about the personality of Gabriel
Gudding, as if he or she knew the poet. There's nothing in the book that
speaks of or from any "ennui": quite the contrary. This book is, I think,
trying precisely NOT to fit into the nominal poetic modes that some more
conservative readers will want from their poets. The reader from San Diego
says that Gudding won't or can't "subject [himself] to the process of
becoming [a poet]" -- and thank goodness Gudding hasn't, won't, or can't do
so: we have enough pretenders to the 2-dimensional poet-throne, writing
saccharin, empty, sweetly grieving poems about mice in bags. Give me an
extra-vagant poet with verve, a fiery intelligence, a true reverence for
the darkness in us, and an undeniable ability with language (which even the
reader from San Diego acknowledges Gudding has) -- and keep all your young
Nick Flynn's and Pinsky's. Gimme the young Gudding. The guy can write.

And though I haven't, like the self-styled "Reader from New Jersey," taught part-time at extremely important schools like BROWN (though I gave a reading there once where they were teaching my book), I have, I want to say, worked on the railroad (full-time) and taught at community colleges in New Jerseyish states like Illinois. The scandalized Reader from New Jersey proves three things: 1) He knows not much of the tradition of comedy and insult in poetry that stretches back to the Vedics and pre-Socratics, then flowers in the Augustans (Roman and English), and now pops its pupal blossom from the pen of the scatalogical and learned Mr. Gudding, he a kind of post-pomo centaur with the head of Martial and the [...] of Pope, who drags himself like Kit Smart on his knees through the streets of Normal, proclaiming that farts and butts are also beautiful and mysterious, 2) his aesthetical predilections have been shaped by the decidedly minor work of Phil Levine, and 3) that any new Trojan Horse of sense and sound rolled through the gates of the art, such as the book _A Defense of Poetry_, will always bring out some poignantly silly and self-important fellow from New Jersey who hops up and down in contempt like a fat-assed monacled guy in a bowler hat at the Armory Show.

A Reader from Illinois

The title poem, "A Defense of Poetry," is one of the funniest, strangest and most inspired poems I have ever read. The irreverence of many of the poems in this book is justified -- and perhaps excused -- by the sheer verbal brilliance of the poet. Gudding is hugely learned and has a prodigious ear. The poems here range from the formal to those that have a kind of "avant-garde" (even a whacked or disturbed) sensibility. But all of these poems are marked by a peculiar mixture of intelligence, gravity, comedy, and emotion that I have never seen before. The poems, in short, frankly shocked me: they are inventive (indeed, ingenious), biting, and quite unforgettable. I look forward to more from this odd, new, brilliant, and award-winning poet. A great read, a great buy.