On Ethan Paquin's Post-Postmodernist Poetry

"Something that can be written about is the lack of promises in poetry, the lack of promising poetry," wrote Ethan Paquin in a prose poem called "Poetry Is No Cure" from his much praised second book The Violence published in 2005 by Ahsahta Press.  That clever bit of wordplay notwithstanding, the collection--which was picked as the runner up selection for the Poetry Society of America's prestigious William Carlos Williams Award--marked the breakthrough of an influential new voice on the

Buffalo

area literary scene, and one that has already garnered significant international recognition.

Now, at age 32, Paquin--a New Hampshire native who is founder and editor of the online international literary journal Slope and the related small poetry press, Slope Editions as well as Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program at Medaille College--returns with My Thieves, a substantial follow-up volume published this month by Salt, a leading United Kingdom based independent publisher of new poetry and innovative fiction.

At the heart of Paquin's poetry is a remarkable set of dichotomies that animate his work and provide it with a kind of dissonance and internal tension not unlike that which made the early work of Robert Creeley so compelling.  On the one hand, in his formal presentation and approach to poetic space, his pastiche of shifting vocal registers (everything from Latin phrases to the archaisms of the King James Bible), his appropriation of various literary tropes and the largest vocabulary of any Generation X poet I've yet encountered--Paquin is an unalloyed postmodernist with strong leanings toward the deconstructive strategies of "language" poetry.   

There is, on the other hand, a countervailing grammar of moral consequence and religiosity that manifests itself with stunning effect in Paquin's work, sometimes as a Book of Job-like questioning of the existence of God and his nature, and more generally as an unmistakable sense of spiritual longing that culminates in an unfashionable search for meaning.  As a former student of both James Tate and Franz Wright at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, it is perhaps not surprising that his work would be drawn in seemingly contradictory directions, but all the more impressive for making a virtue of these paradoxes.

In "Post-Post Poem" from The Violence, Paquin locates himself in a lineage of poets that recalls the "begats" of Chapter One of the Bible's Gospel of Matthew:

"Cicero"/ becomes/ "Keats"/ becomes/ "Stevens"/ becomes/ "Ashbery"/ becomes/ "Bernstein"/ becomes/ "Paquin"

But the seeming bravado of this assertion gives way to what is ultimately an expression of vulnerability and self-doubt:

“…the critics/ are right, my poems are not/ poems but they/ are evidence in/ a really dinky/ in a murky/corner of the/chain of human/ stuff that will be burned…when trumpets/sound and poets, whose work meant, / will be lifted and/ saved while I will/ pay for abusing/the only thing I ever knew how/to use except my/ [expletive] …and burn.

Poems which move from grandiosity to self-loathing in a single stanza are rare, but the oppositional nature of Paquin’s writing exposes too much inner life to read as simply a composition of arbitrary signifiers or postmodern exercise in confessional irony.  To coin a phrase the work itself suggests, it would not be unfair to call Paquin a “post postmodernist poet.”

In a sense, My Thieves picks up where The Violence left off with Paquin exploring the interstices between art and experience, between language and the self:

"My thieves are letters and words/that like wheelbarrows/cart bits of me off and then , FLIP!, and over an edge—like into a sea… I do the dumping on my own, the pushing the wheelbarrow,/the sanctioning the carting/ the colouring the sea seaish colours/the caring about the sea at all!

What’s new is the poet’s sense of diminution (he concludes the title poem writing “Ethan Paquin is an aggregate/ of sinew and worn things/ that wrinkle easily”) and alienation from his own work.  It’s a theme he returns to repeatedly in this collection to consider what he calls “the dissipation of the author”—as in “Where Has the Pastoral Gone?” where he writes of a “working poet” writing a tract “that slowly reveals the theft that/ has occurred over three decades/ theft of the author disappearance and/ dissipation of the author the/ working poet become a carriage for/ the continuity of others’ ideas.”

With his creative ego under siege, Paquin—who has often described himself as a poet with a painter’s sensibility—moves toward forms that apply language to the space of the page in a more tactile sense.  In homage to the abstract minimalist poet Robert Lax (“Lax Lax”) and a subsequent series of poems including “What is Language?” “Simplicity” and “Simplicity Through The Logotext,” he experiments with the possibility of recovering lyricism through visual form.

What remains essential about Paquin’s work is its boundlessness and sense of ambition, its eagerness to raise “a gravestone to the violence of language,” and its persistence in “Spanning the edge with a thread in dark spare-times/to measure the guts of the thing...”

Comments

[Pippo Link]

A Friend's Greeting

I'd like to be the sort of friend that
you have been to me;
I'd like to be the help that
you've been always glad to be;

I'd like to mean as much to you
each minute of the day
As you have meant, old friend of mine,
to me along the way.

I'd like to do the big things and
the splendid things for you,
To brush the gray from out your skies
and leave them only blue;

I'd like to say the kindly things that
I so oft have heard,
And feel that I could rouse your soul
the way that mine you've stirred.

I'd like to give you back the joy
that you have given me,
Yet that were wishing you a need
I hope will never be;

I'd like to make you feel as rich as I,
who travel on
Undaunted in the darkest hours with you to
lean upon.

I'm wishing at this time that I
could but repay
A portion of the gladness that
you've strewn along my way;

And could I have one wish this year,
this only would it be:
I'd like to be the sort of friend
that you have been to me.

http://www.br3games.com

[tourneur]

But can you dance to it?

[Dave Lampe]

Maybe past post-modern, RD?
He certainly reads well and
should be heard (will be
heard) on other campuses and
reading halls in Buffalo
before they, too, are past
(or he is past them).