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4.0 out of 5 stars
Poetry? No, but one great story.,
By
This review is from: Remedies for Vertigo (Paperback)
I know nothing about the author, Walter Bargen. The bio says that, after winning a fellowship and some prizes, he's published a couple of books and in some magazines.
"Remedies for Vertigo" (Cherry Grove Collections, 2006) is a collection of what could be charitably described as prose poems, with and without linebreaks. The subject is flight. One exception aside, the efforts are poetry without poetry: no attention to rhythms or sonics, no innovative use of technique and no evidence of form beyond random line and strophe breaks. About half the book is taken up with a core dump of unrelated metaphors. These tropes barely comprise a unified sentence, let alone a consistent storyline. "The Extinction of White Pants" is typical: Everywhere: banging into windshields, hanging between cats' fangs, in heaping mounds are six-hundred-feet-high transmission towers, in flattened glyphs under tires, sticking obliquely in radiator grills, limp in the hands of crying six-year- olds, flying through doors into windowless rooms, and stunned by unswinging brooms, angling up sleeves and unbuttoned shirts, The piece goes on and on in similar disjointed fashion without identifying who or what could have done all of these things. Or why we should care. This is but one of the book's many page-long sentences. It's like a Silken Tent city. One reads these run-ons like an anxious debutante, praying for a period. The dull prose iterates disparate factoids endlessly, like an enervated parody of Bob Dylan ("Subterranean Homesick Blahs"). Devoid of device, it is as memorable as a coma. Indeed, the poems don't need a reader to forget them; they forget themselves. Each begins with an undisguised introduction to a literary laundry list and ends in non sequitur. When I say that "Remedies for Vertigo" is "poetry without poetry" I don't mean it in a good "Sweet Like a Crow" way. Like a Shaolin monk treading on rice paper, the writing goes to great lengths to avoid leaving any impression behind. Recommending this book would seem to make as much sense as a Spanish spelling bee. Nevertheless, hello. Let me introduce you to another view of "Remedies for Vertigo". Start with the discrete images and metaphors, including those in the excerpt above. Treat them as writing prompts, the challenge being to give them a context. Consider the book an encyclopedia of misused, unsorted thoughts or a no-kill shelter for unwanted tropes. You could open the volume to almost any page and build a poem/home around any of these tear-away phrases. Copyright wouldn't be a problem because you'd likely want to change the actual words to inject sonics and rhythm anyway. This is a collection more suited to sampling than reading. Conveniently, you can leave it in the middle of a poem--hell, in mid-sentence--and miss nothing. There is another compelling reason to rush out and get a copy of this tome, if you can. One of its few attempts to relate a coherent narrative happens to rank among the most dramatic, horrifying stories in contemporary literature, culminating in what is literally a "killer ending". Flight Lessons Socrates wrote: Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt? Months high in the Carpathian Mountains, his legs feel unreal without his skis. The first sentence lowers our expectations with the clichéd "feel unreal" and the "form": prose tercets with narrowed margins. The next four sentences come as close as Mr. Bargen does to free verse: copious assonance and some well presented alliteration and consonance; a binary rhythm with a lot of double iambs; and, sibilance parallelling the snaking ski tracks, "cold scales", and "serpentine line". He's ready to believe his body blue, his skin meant to peel. A hissing snow shades cold scales over those peaks. He's patiently absorbed in the fierce calculations of ambush when he's captured in a white uniform in a green forest. He stands in a serpentine line amid hills of fuming sawdust. The line grows shorter. The prisoners prodded by guards who hold them down by their shoulders before the sawmill's blade. Heads mushroom in fairy rings over the frozen dirt. Two men ahead of him when shells explode. The guards dive under wagons corded with headless bodies. He runs, swims an ice-choked river. His medals framed on a wall in the farmhouse that was once half barn, where chickens roosted in the rafters and cows slept on the other side of the bedroom wall. The attic is haunted on windy nights by scratching. An old woman hobbles into the yard, the sum of world wars, inflation, depression. She deftly throttles an unsuspecting chicken, carries it squawking to the chopping block. In one motion she wrings its neck and swings the hatchet with a quick twist. Its head pops off. The feathered heap, legs frantic, claws the bare ground. Clownish, acrobatic, the body leaps forward then flips on its back, wings beating against bare ground. The final line, which I won't reveal here, is worth the price of the book.
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