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National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
A National Book Award Finalist
Metaphysical Dog offers a vital, searching collection from one of finest American poets at work today
In "Those Nights," Frank Bidart writes: "We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not." Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog, Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet's most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours.
Near the end of the book, Bidart writes:
In adolescence, you thought your work
ancient work: to decipher at last
human beings' relation to God. Decipher
love. To make what was once whole
whole again: or to see
why it never should have been thought whole.
This "ancient work" reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the "hunger for the Absolute"—a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled "History is a series of failed revelations."
The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years.
One of Publishers Weekly's Best Poetry Books
A New York Times Notable Book
An NPR Best Book of the Year
| ISBN-13: | 9780374713386 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 07/08/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
METAPHYSICAL DOG
Belafont, who reproduced what we did
not as an act of supine
imitation, but in defiance—
butt on couch and front legs straddling
space to rest on an ottoman, barking till
his masters clean his teeth with dental floss.
How dare being
give him this body.
Held up to a mirror, he writhed.
WRITING "ELLEN WEST"
was exorcism.
•
Exorcism of that thing within Frank that wanted, after his mother's death, to die.
•
Inside him was that thing that he must expel from him to live.
•
He read "The Case of Ellen West" as a senior in college and immediately wanted
to write a poem about it but couldn't so he stored it, as he has stored so much
that awaits existence.
•
Unlike Ellen he was never anorexic but like Ellen he was obsessed with eating
and the arbitrariness of gender and having to have a body.
•
Ellen lived out the war between the mind and the body, lived out in her body
each stage of the war, its journey and progress, in which compromise,
reconciliation is attempted then rejected then mourned, till she reaches at
last, in an ecstasy costing not less than everything, death.
•
He was grateful he was not impelled to live out the war in his body, hiding in
compromise, well wadded with art he adored and with stupidity and distraction.
•
The particularity inherent in almost all narrative, though contingent and
exhausting, tells the story of the encounter with particularity that flesh as flesh must make.
•
"Ellen West" was written in the year after his mother's death.
•
By the time she died he had so thoroughly betrayed the ground of intimacy on
which his life was founded he had no right to live.
•
No use for him to tell himself that he shouldn't feel this because he felt this.
•
He didn't think this but he thought this.
•
After she died his body wanted to die, but his brain, his cunning, didn't.
•
He likes narratives with plots that feel as if no one willed them.
•
His mother in her last year revealed that she wanted him to move back to Bakersfield and teach at Bakersfield College and live down the block.
•
He thought his mother, without knowing that this is what she wanted, wanted him to die.
•
All he had told her in words and more than words for years was that her
possessiveness and terror at his independence were wrong, wrong, wrong.
•
He was the only person she wanted to be with but he refused to live down the
block and then she died.
•
It must be lifted from the mind
must be lifted and placed elsewhere
must not remain in the mind alone
•
Out of the thousand myriad voices, thousand myriad stories in each human head,
when his mother died, there was Ellen West.
•
This is the body that you can draw out of you to expel from you the desire to die.
•
Give it a voice, give each scene of her life a particularity and necessity that in Binswanger's recital are absent.
•
Enter her skin so that you can then make her other and expel her.
•
Survive her.
•
Animal mind, eating the ground of Western thought, the "mind-body" problem.
•
She, who in the last months of her life abandoned writing poems in disgust at the failure of her poems, is a poem.
•
She in death is incarnated on a journey whose voice is the voice of her journey.
•
Arrogance of Plutarch, of Shakespeare and Berlioz, who thought they made what Cleopatra herself could not make.
•
Arrogance of the maker.
•
Werther killed himself and then young men all over Europe imitated him and
killed themselves but his author, Goethe, cunning master of praxis, lived.
•
Frank thought when anything is made it is made not by its likeness, not by its
twin or mirror, but its opposite.
•
Ellen in his poem asks Without a body, who can know himself at all?
•
In your pajamas, you moved down the stairs just to the point where the adults
couldn't yet see you, to hear more clearly the din, the sweet cacophony of adults partying
. •
Phonograph voices among them, phonograph voices, their magpie beauty.
•
Sweet din.
•
Magpie beauty.
•
One more poem, one more book in which you figure out how to make something out of not knowing enough.
LIKE
Woe is blunted not erased
by like. Your hands were too full, then
empty. At the grave's
lip, secretly you imagine then
refuse to imaginev
a spectre
so like what you watched die, the unique
soul you loved endures a second death.
The dead hate like, bitter
when the living with too-small
grief replace them. You dread
loving again, exhausted by the hungers
ineradicable in his presence. You resis
t strangers until a stranger makes the old hungers
brutally wake. We live by symbolic
substitution. At the grave's lip, what is
but is not is what
returns you to what is not.
Hunger for the Absolute
THOSE NIGHTS
(FOR M.P.)
Those nights when despite his exhaustion or indifference
you persisted, then finally it
caught, so that at last he too
wanted it, suddenly was desperate to reach it,
you felt his muscles want it
more than anything, as if through this chaos, this
wilderness he again knew the one thing he must reach
though later, after
he found it, his resentment implied he had been forced.
•
Those nights ended because what was
missing could never be by
the will supplied. We who could get
somewhere through
words through
sex could not. I was, you said, your
shrink: that's how
I held you. I failed as my own.
•
Now you surely are dead. I've searched
the databases: you everywhere
elude us. Long ago without your
reaching to tell me, surely
the plague killed you. Each thing in your life
you found so
incommensurate to the spirit
I imagine that becoming
untraceable makes you smile.
NAME THE BED
Halflight just after dawn. As you turned back
in the doorway, you to whom the ordinary
sensuous world seldom speaks
expected to see in the thrown-off
rumpled bedclothes nothing.
•
Scream stretched across it.
•
Someone wanted more from that bed
than was found there.
•
Name the bed that's not true of.
•
Bed where your twin
died. Eraser bed.
QUEER
Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
Everybody already knows everything
so you can
lie to them. That's what they want.
But lie to yourself, what you will
lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.
•
For each gay kid whose adolescence
was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial
scenario
forever is coming out—
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.
•
Involuted velleities of self-erasure.
•
Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative
designed to confer existence.
If I had managed to come out to my
mother, she would have blamed not
me, but herself.
The door through which you were shoved out
into the light
was self-loathing and terror.
•
Thank you, terror!
You learned early that adults' genteel
fantasies about human life
were not, for you, life. You think sex
is a knife
driven into you to teach you that.
HISTORY
For two years, my father chose to live at
The Bakersfield Inn, which called itself
the largest motel in the world.
There, surrounded by metal furniture
painted to look like wood, I told him that I
wanted to be a priest, a Trappist.
He asked how I could live without pussy.
He asked this earnestly. This confession
of what he perceived as need
was generous. I could not tell him.
•
Sex shouldn't be part of marriage.
Your father and I,—
... sex shouldn't be part of marriage.
•
That she loved and continued to love him
alone: and he, her: even after marrying others—
then they got old and stopped talking this way.
•
Ecstasy in your surrender to adolescent
God-hunger, ecstasy
promised by obliterated sex, ecstasy
in which you are free because bound—
in which you call the God who made
what must be obliterated in you love.
•
In a labyrinth of blankets in the garage
at seven
with a neighbor boy
you learned abasement
learned amazed that what must be
obliterated in you is the twisted
obverse of what underlies everything.
•
Chaos of love, chaos of sex that
marriage did not solve or
mask, God did not solve or mask.
•
Grant and Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby,
in which Grant finally realizes being
with her is more fun than anything.
•
What they left behind
they left behind
broken. The fiction
even they accepted, even they believed
was that once
it was whole.
Once it was whole
left all who swallowed it,
however skeptical, forever hungry.
•
The generation that followed, just like their
famished parents, fell in love with the fiction.
They smeared shit all over
their inheritance because it was broken,
because they fell in love with it.
But I had found my work.
HUNGER FOR THE ABSOLUTE
Earth you know is round but seems flat.
You can't trust
your senses.
You thought you had seen every variety of creature
but not
this creature.
•
When I met him, I knew I had
weaned myself from God, not
hunger for the absolute. O unquenched
mouth, tonguing what is and must
remain inapprehensible—
saying You are not finite. You are not finite.
DEFROCKED
Christ the bridegroom, the briefly
almost-satiated soul forever then
the bride—
the true language of ecstasy
is the forbidden
language of the mystics:
I am true love that false was never.
I would be pierced
And I would pierce
I would eat
And I would be eaten
I am peace that is nowhere in time.
Naked their
encounter with the absolute,—
pilgrimage to a cross in the void.
A journey you still must travel, for
which you have no language
since you no longer believe it exists.
•
When what we understand about
what we are
changes, whole
parts of us fall mute.
•
We have attached sensors to your most intimate
body parts, so that we may measure
what you think, not what you think you think.
The image now on the screen
will circumvent your superego and directly stimulate your
vagina or dick
or fail to. Writing has existed for centuries to tell us
what you think you think. Liar,
we are interested in what lies
beneath that. This won't hurt.
•
Even in lawless dreams, something
each night in me again
denies me
the false coin, false
creature I crave to embrace—
for those milliseconds, not
false. Not false. Even if false,
the waters of paradise
are there, in the mind, the sleeping
mind. Why this puritan each
night inside me that again denies me.
•
Chimeras glitter: fierce energy you
envy.
Chimeras ignorant they're chimeras
beckon.
As you reach into their crotch, they foretell
your fate.
With a sudden rush of milk you taste
what has
no end.
•
We long for the Absolute, Royce
said. Voices you once
heard that you can never not hear again,—
... spoiled priest, liar, if you want something
enough, sometimes you think it's there.
Excerpted from Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart. Copyright © 2013 Frank Bidart. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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