A review of John Barton, HYMN (London, Ontario: Brick Books, 2009)
I have always been
interested in the fact that the very people who issue gay works of
art, having done so, then hold back from properly marketing them as
such. This commercial ploy, or lack of one, is most conspicuous, I
think, in the rear-cover blurbs of DVDs, which very rarely mention
the gayness of films’ themes, plots or characters. It is as if,
having funded the production of the gay work, publishing houses and
production and distribution companies then want to recoup their
losses by conning a wider audience into believing what they are about
to buy is as wholesomely straight as Sarah Palin.
I have observed the
same tendency even in the blurbs of poetry collections, which, these
days, are hardly likely to turn the heads of a mass market, no matter
what is written on the back, or even the front, of the books. In the
case of the present collection by the distinguished Canadian poet
John Barton, the publisher’s website speaks of it as a ‘journey
in search of love through the contemporary homoerotic male body’,
adding that ‘Hymn stokes the fires of homoerotic romantic
love with its polar extremes of intimacy and solitude’. Now,
‘homoerotic’ is, surely, not such a very controversial word, but
it does not appear on the book itself—not even a book that, like
this, has a picture of two, or perhaps three, men (almost) embracing
on its front cover.
The
pithiest thing about the book is the pun in its title, suggesting a
hymn to him (whom?). The word also always brings ‘hymen’ to my
mind—but perhaps, in this case, that is one distraction too far. In
an interview on his publisher’s website, Barton says, ‘Hymn
puts words to the music of disappointment and aspiration that gay men
often feel in the pursuit of—and during the detours they take,
consciously and unconsciously, on the way to and away from—love.’
This parenthesis, this detour on detours, is typical of Barton’s
work at its best and worst—the individual reader can make this
qualitative choice. There are times when it is the length and
convolution of his sentences that absorbs one’s attention, rather
than the argument itself.
Of
course, when I suggest of a poet that he uses too many words, I feel
like Joseph II: ‘Too many notes, my dear Mozart!’ And Barton is
indeed prolix—but that is not necessarily a bad thing. The
Canadians, too, have learned from the greatest bard of their southern
neighbours, Walt Whitman, how to encompass an enormous land mass in
verse that is both expansive and yet also, somehow, to the point. But
the main technical dialectic with which Barton engages is Ezra
Pound's. There is some purpose for any modern, Anglophone poet in
countering the rules of Imagism as laid down before the First World
War by Pound, or at least in straying from them when the mood
strikes. There is no absolute reason why poetry should state things
more briefly than prose would. Why should it not luxuriate in the
flow of language for its own sake? Barton clearly knows that, as well
as the Chinese and Japanese miniaturists, Pound also admired the
profuse verbosity of Chaucer and Browning.
In
a poem addressed to ‘Drella’ (Andy Warhol), Barton refers to his
characteristic grammatical unit as ‘this kleptomaniac run-on
sentence’, suggesting that the point of the thing, like that of
Whitman’s lists, is accumulation rather than the ravelling of a
complex argument. I am all for complex sentences—there are not
enough of them in modern poetry. (A plague of parataxis in Britain
has left most of our lyric poets incapable of stringing together a
two-clause sentence without fucking up its grammar.) But I do not
consistently feel the same confidence in Barton’s control of
syntax, when he is digressing, that I do feel when going along with
the grammatical arabesques of Marcel Proust or Henry James, when
circumlocution and prolixity seem so tightly harnessed to the
complexity of the thing being said and the meticulousness of the
thought process. Those two great masters of digression never ramble.
They never lose their concentration; and as a result, when reading
them, neither do I.
Contrary
to the publisher’s website, it is really only in the fourth of the
book’s five sections that Barton explicitly dwells on many aspects
of contemporary gay life and the ancient variants it seems to echo.
His long poem ‘Days of 2004, Days of Cavafy’, about and addressed
to Constantine Cavafy, speaks of the great Greek poet’s
relationship with the classical world as a kind of mutual or
reciprocal invagination: ‘the whole of an ancient world inside you
/ and you inside it’. Here, for the second time in the book, the
lines are so long that the poem is printed at ninety degrees to the
convention, so that one has to hold the book sideways, one page above
the other. This cleverly discomfiting ploy subverts one's confidence
and makes the very act of reading seem strange--'queer', if you must.
Usually, one only holds a book this way up to look at certain kinds
of illustration.
The poem is broad in
its sweep as well as its line. Violating one of the sacred principles
of Foucaultian queer theory, it claims connections between the sexual
lives of men in different places and different times: ‘men who
travel lives not too indifferent / to our own, travelling from Sparta
to Thermopylae, from Sussex Drive to Albion Road’—the latter
being streets in Ottawa. At first, ‘indifferent’ looks like a
malapropism for ‘similar’; but one soon understands that each
generation of man-loving men takes an interest in others both past
and future, with an associative desire that is wishful and wistful,
all the more powerful for the distances it manages to span.
By
the end of the poem, it is clear that Barton is looking back to
ancient Greeks, not merely from Cavafy’s modernity, nor even from
his own post-modernity, but from some imagined future point, from
which even our most cherished technological and verbal innovations
(an earlier poem has invoked Cavafy in the abbreviations of
text-speak) will seem primitive. When he addresses ‘men of the
future looking backwards’ he inevitably echoes our position in
relation to Cavafy, or Cavafy’s to Plato, and takes bodily
possession of the words such men once addressed, and continue
addressing, to posterity.
Barton’s versions of
gayness are full of paradoxes, not merely mimicking (as so much
modern camp does badly) the wit of Oscar Wilde, but purposely
convulsing our chronologies and complacencies by questioning what we
take for granted as their logic. The poem ‘Fucking the Minotaur’
threads its way through the labyrinth of a gay bathhouse and the less
convoluted maze of the metro journey home, interestingly concluding
that the latter is by far the more erotic space. In another poem,
Barton’s take on ‘Amnesia’, that condition so perfectly
confuted in its own etymology, has gay men going about their business
among the heritage sites of modern Athens, not only making (in
Browning’s evocative phrase) ‘love among the ruins’ but
reviving what entropy had once undone. It is as if the poet were to
counter the pessimism of Eliot’s claim, ‘these fragments I have
shored against my ruins’, not much less than a century later, with
his own, these ruins I have shored against my fragments.
