Archived Review:

reviewed by Peter Darbyshire and George Murray

A Publishers Weekly review from 2000 called Enola Gay a "triumph, one which perhaps does for poetry what David Foster Wallace has done for prose fiction," while one in Kirkus Reviews ends with: "If you've been to one Armageddon, you've been to them all." Hmmm. 

PETER: Where did you first hear about Enola Gay? I first read about it in Salon. I'd never heard of Mark Levine before, but the review's description of the book as a meditation on the aftermath of destruction intrigued me, especially given the title of the book. Brilliant title for a collection of poems about apocalypse, I think.

GEORGE: I think I first heard about Enola Gay through Salon as well, but I first saw it on a messy table in your living room when you were living in Toronto. (I think it says something that we're reviewing from copies we bought to read not review—I saw Levine read at the KGB Bar Series in New York City in 2001. Did you know he's Canadian?) I remember being struck by the vertical red line on the cover and how it bisected the evocative title and was offset by the darkness of the ashes. It looked like it was a computer tracing a very direct bomb.

PETER: I like that line splitting the words of the title too. It took on more meaning for me as I read the book. There's so much disruption of meaning and history in the poems, and here's this name that it is synonymous with incredible destruction, which is rife with so much meaning, and it's ruptured too. A beautiful cover. One of those books I like to display on my bookshelf.

I didn't know Levine was Canadian. Any idea of his history?

Moving past the cover, I knew I had to buy the book after reading one of the excerpts in Salon, from a poem called "Eclipse, Eclipse":

The gods are not well braced. Their sleeves are
tattered and their flaring rockets
lie disabled by vandals.
Delay is all; all matrimony, plasma,
tokens of esteem, all vows exchanged in the cold heavens ...
The law is coming, three battered islands hence;
the splash is coming, the radar is coming, the law
is coming wearing Mother's private wig. 

Comes a horseman, steady on the climb, a blade
against his thigh, a rumor on his spine.

The juxtaposition of ages here really captured me, especially considering the sense of impending. well, what? There's the aforementioned apocalypse, but you're not certain what that apocalypse is. The poem has a Nostradamus-like prophetic feel to it, only it's looking at the present and past rather than the future. The part that really stuck with me was "the radar is coming." This line totally startled me and kept ringing in my head after I'd finished the poem. The radar is coming. What does that mean?

GEORGE: "the radar is coming" can't be read out of context of the poem itself, because it is the connections between each of the seemingly disparate images that creates the atmosphere of foreboding. In so tightly bound a collection, the single line falls apart into a phonetically pleasing turn of phrase that is simply nonsense.

Though he may be Canadian, Levine writes like an American, and if there's one thing I've learned about American poetry, especially that of the younger generations, it's that you can't underestimate the influence of Wallace Stevens. If Whitman and Dickinson are the Mother and Father (hee!) of American poetry, Stevens is the charismatic, yet crazy, uncle.

It seems to me that with "Eclipse, Eclipse" Levine is creating an atmosphere both expectant and menacing and then working to undermine it with farce ("Mother's private wig.") So early in the book, I suspect this is a reference to the poet as prophet ("the radar is coming"), as "unacknowledged legislator" ("the law is coming"), as tsunami-like force of nature ("the splash is coming"), and finally as destroyer of his own intentions ("comes a horseman"). I think the horseman is less the figure of apocalypse and more the outranging scout of poetry ("a pencil in his glove and shovel in his soul.")

PETER: I agree with this to an extent. "Mother's private wig" is a jarring turn in a series of, as you say, expectant and menacing observations. Yet I'm not sure it works on the level of farce, or even that it "undermines." I think the point is not subversion but dislocation. And that wig is linked pretty closely to "law," which makes me wonder if there is a deliberate slippage between the ceremonial wig worn by legal authorities in some places and "Mother's wig." In a sense, you could probably read this as a continuation of the preceding lines, insofar as it's setting up an authority associated with the past (those wigs are tied to a practice that is eroding) adrift in a context-less present. But that would just be a reading. At any rate, it reads less like nonsense to me and more like, I don't know, a different kind of language. Perhaps even a code.

As for your argument that everything in this section refers back to the poet, I think that's a misreading (and just the kind a poet would make!). I think the collection does concern itself intimately with reworking cultural forms and narratives, but I think it does so not to dwell on writers or even writing, but to explore new ways of making meaning out of our inherited tradition. It's kind of like Yates' rough, vague beast slouching toward Bethlehem, only Bethlehem now is the atomic age.

GEORGE: Nice. But apparently they can't find atomic weapons in the Middle East… Haven't you been following? I like the link between the wig and the law. I missed that. Regarding your point about dislocation, when I wrote "undermine" I meant exactly that. Undermining narrative, whether through farce or simply unexpected image, is part of what Levine spends most of the book doing. Look at the first stanza of the poem "Counting the Forests," 

We had little to work with. That was his plan.
He was out until daybreak or nightfall or until
the reappearance of his servant who had fled
to the mountains during the ice storm.
He was out; he was out and his voice
was gone too. We heard streetcars scraping
down the hill outside his room; we heard drills
pressing the walls of the blue quarry.

 Baffling, yet you can't stop reading.

The joy of Levine's lines is that they favour atmosphere and inference over narrative and direct allusion. They are true lyrics, bound by a kind of "abstract impressionism" rather than narrative sense, and belong somewhat to the American Elliptical School (the Elliptical movement in the US is something of a descendant of LANGUAGE poetry that values poetic language and beautiful turns of phrase, yet directly works to undermine—or dislocate—its own coherence through destroying narrative—unlike other formally experimental forms, Ellipticism values the emotional response over the intellectual). Yet this is also what can make these poems inaccessible to some readers.

PETER:  I have to admit I’m not really familiar with the Elliptical movement, so I can’t comment on that aspect of Levine’s work (sounds like something I should have encountered in grad school, but they don’t really like to teach actual literary history in English departments anymore). However, I think I see what you’re talking about in regard to the way the poems privilege emotion and atmosphere. It reminds me a little of when I talked to Ken Babstock about his first collection, Mean, and he said the book had an emotional narrative.

What I find intriguing about “Counting the Forests” is the way that the collection of seemingly senseless, seemingly unrelated lines in the poem sort of assemble themselves into some sort of narrative, but a narrative that, as you say, is baffling. It’s not complete abstraction; the lines make sense and they do appear to be telling a story. But the story keeps shifting itself as it goes along. It’s as if you’re reading a stream-of-consciousness poem but you and the writer share completely different contexts. Or maybe it’s dreamlike? It does have that sort of constant morphing of surrealism as the poem continues:

Here in the red forest: a forest of birds.
Birds and dark water and looming red leaves
brushed with murmuring voices.
They swept toward him, the voices, like tensed wings.
And he ran from them; but the red
forest was glazed and the trees were vast
with ice-forms. And at the edge of the red forest
he could see into the stone forest and could see 

the voices rising over the stone floor.

The poem seems to be building significance out of itself as it goes on, reworking the same words and lines like some sort of fractal pattern. Even the conclusion it eventually reaches offers this doubling back on the world of the poem.

And am I just seeing things when I think there’s a nod to Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow” in here? Given the nature of this poem, the proximity of “red” and “glazed” to each other here seems a little more than coincidental. It could be useful to consider the poem through that sort of allusion.

GEORGE: I think that might be stretching it. Though I like the idea of a fractal pattern… While I think "emotional narrative" is one of the more common drives behind a collection of poems, I would add "atmospheric narrative" to that for Enola Gay.  

What do you think about the poems that frame "Forests" ("Jack and Jill" and "Lyric")? I think it's interesting to note that, in a book where several poems are named simply "Lyric," a reader could be tipped off to several possibilities: 1/ this guy writes too fast for titles; 2/ he's perhaps a writer of more than just lyrics because otherwise he might title them each "Poem;" 3/ he's expressing some importance on the musicality of the line. What do you think of this?

PETER: Yeah, the recurrence of the “Lyric” poems did make me wonder. I think your observation about the musicality of the line is correct. The lines in these poems don’t really give you much on their own, but they play off of each other in a really beautiful way, kind of like an improv jazz piece or something: 

A new instrument slipped from the swinging shelf
and clasped in its blanched stem: daylight
—bringing to mind; bringing to mind—
and lodged in the mire among lost seed.

There went day.

You can’t really pin down what this is saying, but the lines somehow work together, and give you the sense that something is being said. The line “There went day” leaves you with a sense of something being summed up. Reminds me of Christian Bok’s work in a very loose way.

Did you notice that most of the “Lyric” poems seem to imply some sort of other accompanying the narrating voice?

GEORGE: There does seem to be someone walking through the background of all these poems, doesn't there? Someone watching and perhaps directing with a stick. I think of those old war tables with the pieces scattered about them, but moved by a blind man, some stranded in the oceans, yet perfectly placed for some surreal battle.

PETER: I always wanted one of those tables as a child.… As for the “Jack and Jill” poem, this is an angle of the book that really interests me. The poem is pretty straightforward in its updating of the nursery rhyme to the uncertainty and malaise of the rest of the poems, I think:

His name was Jack and Jill …
He is rinsing his stained surface
with heavy water and a drill.”

But you have to wonder why the poem is so concerned with maintaining the formal conventions of the nursery rhyme, with its nonsensical verse:

Was he a rhyme? Was he a trace
of purple smoke escaped from base? 

It seems to me that the book is preoccupied with forms of cultural narratives as much as it is with matters of content (lyrical or otherwise). Take, for instance, the first few poems. It’s not too much of a stretch to read the opening poem of the book, “Then for the Seventh Night,” as containing biblical allusions. It seems to be indicating the failure of religious narratives in the face of technology and an undefined social decay (perhaps more felt than witnessed). I’m thinking here of lines like “Then for the seventh night in as many nights he strayed/into the vacant church” and the “disjointed verse” of the song he sings in the church, near the “microphone with its wires torn out.”

The next poem is “Eclipse, Eclipse,” which continues this line of thought, and which we’ve already discussed, and then we have “Susan Fowler,” which takes what appears to be a completely different direction with its weird succession of dreamlike moments. But it has this preoccupation with psychology, what with the main character’s attempts to interpret the meaning of things and people around him, which then extends to trying to understand himself.

GEORGE: This caught me off guard, these more direct pop-culture references. They seemed terribly out of place in so timeless a landscape, and somewhat unwieldy given the wide range of emotional buttons he's trying to push. Naming a poem "Susan Fowler" in the midst of all the others just baffled me. I mean, I really, really didn't get it.

PETER: I didn’t get the reference to the name, but it didn’t bother me. It just seemed like more indecipherable — or semi-decipherable — cultural detritus. Besides, it’s followed immediately by “Horizon,” which takes the book off in yet another direction in its circling around the “Great War.” This poem seems to have history and progress as its subject matter — more cultural narratives. And then two pages later, “Jack and Jill.” 

So there’s this sense of different sorts of cultural texts, if you will, being explored and reworked in the beginning of the book. Perhaps the idea is to explore and rework different ways of making order through narrative? I don’t think Levine is setting things out in some sort of clear, linear pattern, where every poem has some deeper metatextual meaning, but I think he does concern himself with the inheritance of cultural forms, and he’s playing with those as much as he is with the content/narratives of the poems, and undermining the narrative of form in a similar way.

Or maybe the poems are just randomly placed in the text, and I’m just making my own order.…

GEORGE: At some point do we have to ask ourselves how important it is that a reader understand? But then the question becomes, Which reader? I'm not saying a poem or a book has to be easy (my favourite poet is Geoffrey Hill), but we have to be able to understand. I think your earlier suspicion that Levine might be writing in code is a solid one. I think there is a code here and that we've just touched on one or two levels of it. Levine's work is perhaps just shy of genius only by slender surface story he doesn't give. Reading Enola Gay was definitely an edifying experience but, while I was moved morally and emotionally, because of the layers of obstruction and obfuscation thrown up by these poems I cannot be sure I've been instructed intellectually as Levine intended. Can you want to respond to this and wrap things up?

PETER: Yeah, we’re going on here. Are you sure intellectual instruction was Levine’s point? I’m not certain myself, but that may be because of the very point you’ve made here, that the collection as a whole operates with a certain level of obfuscation. I’m not certain at all what the point of the book was. Every time you think you have it pinned down, it changes gears. So you have the quasi-surreal word play of “Counting the Forests” and “Jack and Jill,” and you think, ah, I see, and then the book throws in a weird narrative piece like “My Friend,” which reads more like a Denis Johnson short story than a poem. Perhaps the “meaning” of the book is contingent upon that “which reader” question.

Let’s end with looking at the poem “Enola Gay.” I had reasonably high expectations that this poem would sum up the book, or give me the key in, or something, but it’s one of the more complex and difficult-to-comprehend poems of the book.

In the first few lines I thought it could be about Hiroshima:

It is many years after the fact.
I sent a squad to gather data
from the sticky asphalt

But then it takes an immediate turn back into the, uh, strange:

                                     and they
are far away and very quiet. I do
wish I had not surrendered my wings.
I am all out of seed.

Again, at the literal level, I have no idea what to make of this. But on the emotional level, something is definitely at work here. And I do like the quiet contradictions buried in the lines here: “I do” playing off “I had not” and “I am” immediately being qualified by  “all out of.”

Then the poem seems to descend into madness:

Can you hear the garden growing? Can you hear its motor?

Can you hear the crystal voices trapped beneath the growing?

Queen of the skies, pour forth your obsessing wrath!

But just when you think the poem has completely lost all context—what the hell is that section with the clam bake about?—it suddenly returns to something familiar with the Monopoly game, albeit only temporarily:

I choose the Thimble, you choose the Horse, Mother the Shoe.
The Messenger will drag behind him the Steam Iron.
And the black man? The black man is measuring us

from his shady perch above the electrical storm,
his finger limp on the device,
clinking “Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow,
the stars be hid that led me to this I.”

Again, it has that dream logic, that sense of things meaning something, but you can’t quite puzzle it out. I wonder if the clue is in a line toward the poem’s end: “The fact remains.” Perhaps this is the key to the whole book. You can read the poems as takes on the absurdity of our culture, of the contingency of meaning, of the instability of order or form or even context, but the facts always remain, the world, unchanging and ultimately indecipherable despite all our attempts to decode it. Kind of Platonic, in a way. Or would that be anti-Platonic? What do you think?

GEORGE: I think we've killed this one and it's time to go. Only the good books die so young.

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