Customer Reviews

The Incentive of the Maggot

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THE INCENTIVE OF THE MAGGOT has been praised for lots of reasons, but most frequently for the intelligent strangeness it uses to talk about our times. It appeared in 2005 just as poets were trying out new ways of leaping around between the political and the personal. Slate does it in an entirely unique way with a voice that can't be imitated. The voice can be bold but vulnerable, or grim but humorous, or ironic but involved in everything it comments on. For Slate, it's just one big world. So far I haven't read any commentary about his language, the sound of his lines, or his syntax, not even Robert Pinsky in his interesting introduction. It's more likely that you hear about his subject matter, which is pretty various. Or how he deals with the political. Read the first poem, "Writing Off Argentina" which is fairly straightforward and filled with detail, and then consider the dreamy weirdness of the last poem called "Turbulent Ferry." How Slate blends all of this into a complete vision is pretty amazing. I call this book is a "classic" because it captures the mid-decade moment like no other book of poems I know of, and it shows us how to speak about world history, family history, and art all at the same time.

Ron Slate, The Incentive of the Maggot (Houghton Mifflin, 2005)

The Incentive of the Maggot, Ron Slate's first book, is very good at what it does. While you may have a slightly difficult time figuring out what, exactly, that is without having a go at Robert Pinsky's introduction, that should take nothing away from the poems themselves:

"Terraces of granite rose from the sea.
On the heights each watery quarry had a name
and a legend, atomic creatures, gangland
graves, a kid who dived and disappeared in 1959
but died in Quang Tin from a punji spike.
When we got to the quarry, our towels rolled, the police
were taking names. Someone was missing.
Would you like a bowl of cold borscht,
asked my grandmother, listening to my story.
Beet-red, sour cream swirled it out of plasma.
History begins with indignation
because it's so hard to remember
what's been remembered...."
(from "Granite City")

What I feel is the book's biggest (I was going to write "major," but really, it isn't) flaw isn't capable of being shown with any excerpt that wouldn't start pushing the boundaries of copyright law, because Slate's poems, like those of many poets who have worked for many years before publishing their first full volume, are all quite wonderful when taken separately; it's when you gather them together that they start to lose their meaning. Reading an excerpt, or a few poems at random, you'll still get the full effect of Slate's intricate, deliberate poems, pieces that demand careful reading and study (and actually give you something in return, unlike those in the Seamus Heaney book you can find reviewed elsewhere in this issue). When you assess a full book of them, however, they tend to flow together, and I don't mean that in a good way.
Don't get me wrong, this is a good book, and one I'm sure I will be returning to many times over the coming years, but I'll always be doing so for a single poem or a small selection, rather than a return journey through the entire volume. Taken in small doses, this is great stuff. *** ½

I've been reading through Ron Slate's first collection, "The Incentive of the Maggot", and what's striking besides the overwrought awfulness of the title, is that Slate hits the ball about half the time. Pinsky regards him as a second coming of Frank O'Hara, and I suppose he would be to someone who can't live without that good poet's name being invoked every other instance, but Slate is way too tense to pick up where O'Hara left off. O'Hara was relaxed, crazed, ecstatic, full of the mess and grace his enthusiasms brought to his verse. He never seemed as if he slaved over a foreign word or academic term, or strained to make the mundane world seem a mere disguise cast over a backlog of history. O'Hara's poems were full of the stuff in the world he lived, actually lived, and he addressed history, irony or political justice in ways that came to him in flashes, stolen moments.His poems , long and short, are records of intense feelings, recorded in whatever direction they might happen to fly.

O'Hara had a natural ear, tuned to music and melodic formation, and the lilt and swing and swagger of the musical phrase never left his lines; there is musicality even in the lesser work.Slate I think is a good poet who had not yet a full collection of finished poems by the time Maggot was published, and what ruins the book are so many poems that divert into mere knowingness, fancy asides where irony is used ham handedly and the larger associations , the flights of metaphor , are angry tirades against eternal injustice and the continuing triumph of the corporately mediocre. Slate is drawn between two schools of American poetry, The New York School with it's vernacular cityscape, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, who cannot discuss a poem without indicting a whole generation of poets that came before them. There is a goodly amount of confessional poetry too, and sometimes it works, but more often than not Slate's writing loses it's pitch and goes off key, plays atonal, goes too quickly from Art Tatum to Cecil Taylor.