Updates will report the adventures of HORSEGOD in the rough and tumble of the literary and commercial world. Below is a review by Patrick Gillespie, whose website PoemShape has attracted over 100,000 visitors at an accelerating pace, impressed by his own fine poems, his lively, learned, straight-shooting essays, the commentary they encourage, and his news of literary Vermont. Below Gillespie's review you'll find my explanation of why I published HORSEGOD with iUniverse.
Horsegod: Collected Poems by Robert Bagg
October 16, 2009
by Patrick Gillespie
• In exchange for a complimentary copy, I expressed interest in reviewing poetry by poets “in exile” – the self-published. Specifically, I was looking for poets who trade in meter or rhyme, the disciplines of traditional poetry. This book, Horsegod: Collected Poems, by Robert Bagg, was the first book I received. What a great way to start.
Me? A reviewer?
And in addition to this book, I have two more books to review. I ask myself: What if it were my own poetry? No poet wants a comment that discourages readers from reading their work.
I favor criticism that analyzes poetry on its own terms rather than according to the tastes of the reviewer. For an idea of what I mean, check out my post on Marjorie Perloff’s criticism. (What poet wants to read that his or her rhymes are too simplistic when that is precisely the kind of rhymes they are pursuing.) Poets make aesthetic choices, and my own philosophy is not to criticize them for that – but to observe.
Let’s see how I do.
About Robert Bagg
Just a couple words, because there’s a perfectly good biography of Bagg at his own website. The thing worth noting (and to my profound envy) is that he met and studied with Robert Frost.
At Amherst he had the good fortune to study with Walker Gibson and James Merrill and to alarm Robert Frost, who chided him for writing about sex, noting that Yeats waited until old age to broach that aspect of experience.
I don’t know to what extent he studied with Frost or the others, but just to have met the great poet sends me into a tailspin of jealousy. Also worth noting is the experience Bagg brings to his poetry.
After a semester at Harvard he earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of Connecticut, taught briefly at the University of Washington (1963-65), and then for the rest of his career at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where he served as Department Chair from 1986 to 1992. His teaching specialties were English Romantic Poetry, Modern Poetry, and Great Books from Homer to Hemingway.
A Limber Lope
To give you an idea of the kind of poetry you can expect to find, here are the final lines of a Sonnet called Caption for a Wire Photo:
(…)machine gun slugs
seek out his jacket and rip up her dress;
exposed while sprinting for a house safe
from this blood-starved cancerous regime—
enraged by a remission all too brief—
their drab lives shed like debris from a dream
they click a neutral camera and point-blank rifle,
feel a shrill heaviness, and are forever still.
The rhyme scheme is that of a Shakespearean Sonnet but Bagg dispenses with an accentual/syllabic meter – normally Iambic Pentameter. He opts for a syllabic line (counting the number of syllables per line). His rhymes are a combination of true rhymes, slant rhymes and wrenched rhymes – reminding one of Emily Dickinson’s approach.
For this reason, his verse will read as rough, muscular, and knotted. But there is maturity in his choices – he’s an experienced poet whose stylistic choices are controlled and deliberate. He avoids an overly end-stopped verse, doubtlessly made easier by the use of a syllabic line and a variety of half-rhymes. The overall effect is of a poet who blends free verse and traditional poetry. A visit to Bagg’s homepage confirms as much:
Bagg also often takes advantage of the freer practice of the twentieth-century, since the “freedom” it encourages allows for plunging ahead when necessary with little heed for decorum.
It does grant the poet greater latitude, but also surrenders some of the effects unique to meter (accentual syllabic) and true rhyme. Nevertheless, Bagg is a model for the younger poet. There is a middle ground between the traditional and free verse aesthetic.
I suspect Bagg is commenting on his own poetics in this seemingly whimsical poem “Girl with Her Pigtails Crooked.”
Her left leg lagged behind the right,
a firm step followed by a limp.
Her pigtails haggled down her neck
like lines of tangled hemp.
I watched the shameless way she lamed,
She needn’t limp so lumpily,
I thought, so I called down to her,
“Hey, you don’t need to limp!”
She let her hair have its head —
it went its separate ways—like rope
let out to trim a coming storm
She stepped into a limber lope.
Think of the pigtailed girl as this little poem and Bagg as the boy who calls down to her: “Hey, you don’t need to limp!” He lets his rhyme and meter, like the girl’s hair, go its separate ways, like “rope let out to trim a coming storm”. His little poem steps into a limber lope, a characterization that could apply to all of his poems.
Some Brief Narration
One of the showpieces in Bagg’s book is a narrative poem called “The Tandem Ride.” You can read the poem in its entirety by visiting Bagg’s webpage: Robert Bagg: Poems, Greek Plays, Essays, Novels, Memoir. The narrative poem is a genre almost altogether unwritten and, though I may be wrong, I suspect that poetry journals are largely to blame. While the great variety of journals provide a venue to an equally great variety of poets, their interest in poetry is of a very limited kind: short; something that will fit politely on a given page.
Some journals limit poems to as little as 25 lines, at most, two pages, but reluctantly. Many of my own poems are eliminated simply by virtue of their length.
The results are obvious. The birth of the poetry journal, of which there are hundreds, coincides with the
ubiquity of the short lyric. The long, sturdy narratives of the romantics and Victorians gave way to short poems that neatly fit onto the page of the poetry journal. Poetry Magazine recently issued an edition of poems that have been published in their pages since their founding in the early 20th Century – The POETRY Anthology, 1912-2002. All but a handful of poems fit neatly on the page.
Nearly all the poems hum along in the first person or first person plural.
Reading POETRY’s anthology reminds me of the dusty old anthologies from the Victorian Era, proudly full of competent period pieces and timely poets – all of which and all of whom are forgotten by the next generation. They’re easy to find. Just look in any used bookstore. You can almost smell them.
Although I haven’t searched exhaustively, I’ve only found one or two stories in nearly five hundred pages of poetry (all among the very first poems published by the periodical) and they are also among the few not written in the first person. These are the better known poems. One is by Robert Frost – his “The Code” – Heroics. The other is by T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As the 20th-Century progressed, poetic ambition seems to have grown smaller and smaller and ever more forgettable.
Bagg’s effort is a welc ome departure. His Keatsian or Spencerian stanzas (depending on how they’re appraised) nicely carry the narration forward. There enjambment, made easier through the use of off-rhymes, helps the poem succeed where others fail.
She pushes a glass door open a crack,
emerges from a tropical greenhouse,
shoes squishing, then pauses – almost goes back-
aware her sweat-drenched translucent blouse
would amuse us, or might even arouse
us more than her breasts did normally.
She’d never say, Come on to me, guys, now’s
the right time! — but I sensed viscerally
she wasn’t the same girl we had chased up that tree.
This is a stanza of almost perfect rhyme (greenhouse and blouse is a wrenched rhyme), but the content and language are thoroughly modern. So many modern poets who write with meter and rhyme seem unable to combine the disciplines with a modern vernacular. Once again, the lack of meter (I don’t normally consider syllabics a meter) and off-rhymes give the poem an almost free verse feel. In some cases, the combined effect buries the rhymes. It’s a deliberate effect.
Some will like it, some won’t. Don’t come to his poetry looking for soaring melody. His voice is modern and rigorous.
In this book, at least, it’s not until the very last pages that this narrative impulse reappears and then on a much smaller scale. That’s somewhat of a disappointment to me, but may not be to other readers. Another disappointment is that the subsequent poems are primarily first person. Some address a “you”, but they all have the feel of a poet discussing himself. I wouldn’t call them confessional, though that term can be broad. There’s an element of confessionalism in all of his poems – but never self-pity.
The Heart of Bagg’s Poetry: His Imagery
And now we really get into the meat of Bagg’s poetry.
Bagg’s imagery is full of physicality and motion, is full of the body. As in his imagery, so too in his poems. He his not a poet, like Keats, at ease with ease, contemplation or sensuality – all qualities that later poets (during the Victorian era) considered too effeminate. Bagg’s physicality won’t be restrained.
In “Be Good,” the child “hugs the intolerable boulder/he has has muscled uphill since birth”.
The world he prefers to observe is also full of kinetic energy.
My iron is wide; you use your blessed driver
and hit it with your fullest strength,
skimming the club head so close to the earth
I hardly hear your shot, but see it fly
over everything toward the green… (“My Father Plays The 17th”)
In describing a couple’s decision to marry, his analogy is full of athleticism:
Ashley and Melissa, you have circled
marriage like a distant challenge–
a mountain ripe for climbing––plotting,
perhaps, a night approach across
a secret valley… (“A Toast for Ashley and Melissa”)
Bagg’s eye is drawn to sport and action (as in this translation from Sophocles Elektra):
Reacting quickly, the skittish
Athenian pulled his horses off
to one side and slowed, allowing
the surge of chariots tot pass him.
Orestes too had laid off the pace,
in last place, trusting his stretch run.
But when he saw the Athenian,
his only rival, still upright, he whistled
shrilly in the ears of his quick fillies
to give chase. The teams drew even,
first one man’s head edging in front,
then the others, as they raced on. (“Chariot Race at Delphi”)
In the powerful and substantial lines of his poem “An Ancient Quarrel,” where Bagg turns an appraisal of Yeats into a titanic wrestling match:
You might be stirring forces hard to quell–
that thrill exploding in your abdomen
when a trapped quarry turns his fear on you.
You go in flailing hand to hand, frenzied
because your own survival’s now at risk.
His barbarous thrusting voice impales you
deep in the place from which your war-cry soars.
Now it’s the pure joy of battle driving…
Notice words like exploding, trapped, flailing, thrusting, impaling. One might object that words like these are only to be expected given the subject matter of the poem. I don’t argue the point, except to point out that Bagg is also in control of the subject matter, and gravitates toward the physical, the muscular, the strain of motion. He has an eye for it.
It’s no wonder, as with the very first poem cited in this review, that Bagg, more than once, is drawn to the topic war. He doesn’t valorize or glorify war, very much the opposite, but his sensibility is drawn to the physicality of war, and its horrors.
And it’s also no wonder that Bagg shocked Frost with the sheer physicality of his poetry’s sexual content. The poem “Cello Suite,” the closest Bagg comes to pure lyricism, is nothing if not a celebration of the sensual physicality of sex and procreation:
Cheek to her cello’s gnarled scroll,
impulsive
irretrievable love,
once wildly made, crests,
then calmly overflows
the cello rosewood curves.
As she lifts her bow to the skies
her lover’s hand slides
under her shoulder,
her breasts lift
to his passing forearm.
(Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t allow me to reproduce the layout of the poem.)
In the lovely lines of his poem “Twelfth Night”:
If music be love’s food, disguise
must be love’s speech, each wanton thrust
engendering a gentle parry–
a playfulness that implicates
interested parties wearing tights.
At the start of this poem Bagg praises Viola’s “masculine pluck,” and one gets the feeling that this is no idle praise, that this is precisely the thing that has drawn the poet’s eye to this character – her masculinity, her insinuated physicality. There is nothing Keatsian or feminine about her (though there is and he knows it). In this poem, at least, there is an unmistakable homoeroticism that Bagg clearly enjoys and with which he is beguiled.
But Bagg’s eye for physicality carries a price. In the entirety of “Twelfth Night” and “Cello Suite,” for example, the reader never once smells. There’s no taste and, oddly enough, there’s no sensation (touch). Bagg prefers motion, sometimes repetitively, where he might have evoked a different sense:
“her sliding tears/reflect her mother’s”
“her lover’s hand slides/under her shoulder”
This isn’t to say that Bagg never evokes the more effeminate senses (as Victorians called them) but never with same eye for the physicality of the body and the world.
Now he’ll go.
His body hardens with still-clenching muscle.
I edge my right heel back along his side,
tuck my head to his neck, feel his ears poke
out straight, and out of rotting earth we churn––
reanimated halves of the one beast
both off us want mightily to be: the Horsegod.
We pound through reeking sludge and angry brush
that claws at our face, snags our thrusting legs.
We are joy pulsing through a line of verse!
Even in these lines, the word reeking has more the feel of physical assault than an appeal to our sense of smell. In what way does sludge reek? What does it reek of? Bagg doesn’t tell us.
As with Bagg’s revelry in sexuality, it should come as no surprise that the physical decline of age is an experience that Bagg feels keenly – it’s slowing and diminishing vigor.
…age so
intensifies what’s left
of our skills and passions,
we linger over them
with apprehensive
appreciation–
as over a single malt’s
evanescent bouquet.
We fear the softening
of our golf swing
will put even the easy
carries beyond our reach;
that lovemaking’s
strife will become
affectionate peace… (“Bittersweetness”)
Bagg is not at ease with an affectionate peace, he fears it. Lovemaking, to Bagg, is strife, of both body and mind. His poetry, a lovemaking of its own order, is full of strife and motion. These are qualities the reader can expect in Bagg’s work. There is more than a touch of Hemingway in Bagg’s vigorous verse and he draws out the comparison himself:
Now that your honed survival skills assert
themsleves, ask fellow Hemingwayfarers
this: When the powers in your loins and mind
wane, should you punish both with a twelve gauge?
Or keep on bringing dark bulletins back
from our last war zone–as Phillip Roth does
(who holds the title Hemingway renounced),
determined to die ringside to himself
matched with an unbeaten serial killer. (“Heavyweights”)
Younger poets and readers looking for a model – for a poet who makes vigorous and muscular use of rhyme and sometimes meter – couldn’t do better than to read Bagg’s verse. His language is modern, forceful, and uncompromising.
Bagg on the Internet
• Visit Bagg’s Homepage for links to other books, opinions and more poems.
• Bagg takes exception to David Orr’s opinions on Political Poetry.
• Three of Bagg’s Poems brought to you by the Brockton Public Library
• The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Kolonos, and Antigone – Translated by Robert Bagg
Why HORSEGOD was Self-published
Self-publishing has long been synonymous with vanity publishing of books that can’t pass commercial or literary muster. Most established authors recoil from going that route, though many will also have an unpublished, but cherished, manuscript on their hard drive or in a drawer. While it may never completely shake its historic stigma, self-publishing has become increasingly attractive, pervasive and successful in the present era. In 2008 more than 566,000 new books saw print; more than half, 285,000, were self-published, or available on demand. That year also saw declines in the numbers of poetry and fiction volumes published, as trade and university presses have become more reluctant to issue books whose sales prospects look marginal. Though it afflicts most genres, the reluctance poetry encounters is perhaps the most severe.
I tried in 2008 to get a new poetry manuscript published. Wesleyan University Press, Gehenna Press, Oxford University Press, Illinois University Press, Azul Editions, and University of Massachusetts Press had published my previous ten books. Given that history, and a respectable sales and recognition record, I hoped I would eventually find a publisher willing to take me on. But as I queried once the traditional poetry-friendly houses, it became clear that only a few, such as Chicago, Pittsburg, Farrar Strauss and Giroux, Norton, and Penguin, still supported significant numbers of established and emerging poets, and these have become extremely selective when adding newcomers.
Contests and boutique publishers have accordingly sprung up to fill an obvious need. But many “winners” launched from such contests and literary start-ups generate little enthusiasm, few reviews, and miniscule sales. I’ve come to wonder if there was a problem in the way contests were conducted and judged, especially after I blew several hundred dollars on entry fees and postage over this past year. A trip to the post office during those months reaped a succession of ominous envelopes addressed to me in my handwriting but with no return address.
Curiously, the consolation letters sent to unsuccessful entrants usually boast that the judges found dozens if not hundreds of splendid manuscripts that, alas, through no fault of their own, didn’t make it into print. There may be some self-congratulation (or delusion) involved here on the part of the contest organizers, but their rejection letters uniformly assure us losers how difficult it was to choose among so many stellar entries. If so, I thought, shouldn’t every winning book of poems be at least interesting, even if not outright terrific? Surely judges could find something entertaining or arresting or otherwise worthy in that glittering pile. But visits to bookstores made me doubt that contests were choosing and promoting the best manuscripts crossing their thresholds.
Virtually all publication contests are enabled by a compulsory subvention provided by the writers entering manuscripts. But the practice, for publishers, of securing subventions is more widespread than is generally known. Many university presses now ask their authors (many of whom are professors, or non-profit, or think-tank scholars) to arrange subventions from their home institutions to defray publishing costs of academic or literary works that otherwise wouldn’t be published. And most institutions are amenable, since refereed publication by an academic press is an expected part of their scholars’ job description. Books so published still must survive a rigorous refereed evaluation process. But authors’ subventions are now a fact of academic publishing. And even commercial publishers expect their authors to spend time and effort marketing their books on tour and by giving readings. Many publishers these days must ask authors to help assume financial risks they once could afford to assume alone.
Today's poetry book publication contests follow a standard protocol: The entrant pays a fee, usually about $25, and submits a manuscript restricted to a set number of pages, rarely more than eighty. Many contests are open only to poets yet to publish a first book. These contests kill many birds with a fusillade of modestly priced stones. Since all contests receive hundreds of entries, the fees they generate go a long way toward paying the publishing costs of the winners, prizes of one, two, or several thousand dollars, and the judges’ and screeners’ stipends. The latter are usually MFA faculty and degree candidates and judge the entries according to their own often surrealocentric lights. One judge’s standard of excellence and/or reasons for excluding an entry might seem to a critic from a different (or older) persuasion evidence of aesthetic prejudice or cronyism. Or simply ignorance of what poetry once was and can still be: musical, intelligible, moving, and exhilarating.
But suppose one thinks my suspicion of the national MFA esthetic is retrograde and that judges actually choose the best manuscripts available. If so, shouldn’t the efficiency of this fiercely competitive process be reflected by the poetry-buying public’s approval of its results? Isn’t the best poetry available launched by such contests? It’s not clear that this is actually the case. My own reaction to new books of poems (shared with the poetry buying public, to judge by anemic sales of contest winners) is that while it identifies many spectacular talents, way too much mediocre and downright awful poetry receives the imprimatur of the pay-to-play contests. If so, why should this be case?
The now defunct but highly effective website, Foetry.com, presented a few years ago appalling evidence that many judges awarded publication and cash within their gift to former students, current lovers, or close friends and colleagues. Not only were the chances of winning a contest highly dependent on the judges sharing an entrant’s aesthetic allegiance, but particular contests were fixed within a buddy system––which still remains up and running in many respects. At least the reaction to Foetry’s revelations has been the adoption by most respectable presses and contests of strong and uniform anti-nepotism guidelines.
Given these disclosures and the slim chance of winning a contest, why shouldn’t authors of all abilities and literary genres cut to the chase, avoid what is patently a scam, and put their own money behind their imaginative products?
Such were my musings after I realized that entering contests was no better than serial purchasing of long-odds lottery tickets. The solution came into focus: Stop buying tickets; save the money; award myself a publication prize. I checked out a few self-publishing companies (there are now quite a few, AuthorHouse, BookSurge, and Lulu, for instance) and eventually chose iUniverse to put into print and promote HORSEGOD: Collected Poems, my eleventh book. Frustration inspired my choice; enlightenment and (so far) satisfaction have rewarded it.
I chose iUniverse because it seemed to offer much the same services as traditional presses do these days, together with some unique advantages, such as close collaboration, consultation and ultimate control. I found that in important respects iUniverse was comparable or superior to houses that had published my earlier books. Its evaluation of my original manuscript was sophisticated, demanding, and at least as useful as any editorial feedback I'd received. This figures, because most of iUniverse’s editorial staff, like other self-publishing houses, has prior experience with commercial and university presses. The design team’s work has also been expert, and I've been allowed to make the final calls in every respect. Like conventional presses, iUniverse rejects some manuscripts, discriminates among those it accepts, and promotes those it judges especially interesting or commercially marketable. It seems likely that the thriving self-publishing industry will adopt business models akin to those iUniverse is using.
One sacrifice a self-publisher makes is to forgo having one's book reviewed. Some decades ago this would have been an even larger sacrifice. Throughout most of the 20th century the New York Times and other major newspapers and literary magazines reviewed likely books of poetry. Not anymore. Poetry is so rarely or grudgingly reviewed these days (the results often read like obituaries) that several recent winners of the Pulitzer Prize were never reviewed by the Times until after their victories. There is no longer a guild of senior critics (with the exception of the indefatigable William Pritchard) interested in and willing to scout out and even-handedly report back on new work. At the 2009 West Chester New Formalism Poetry Conference I met an editor of the Contemporary Poetry Review website. His BMW’s trunk was crammed full of books by poets for whom he forlornly hoped to find reviewers at the conference.
If I'm right in thinking that the current contest system often overlooks excellence uncongenial to its overseers, then it makes sense for poets, new or seasoned, to put money on themselves and opt out of the contest world by self-publishing. Their books’ quality and interest will then be judged by a more receptive bloc of readers than the same manuscripts would be evaluated by rivalrous MaFiA families. That audience would begin with a poet's own family, known admirers, and a Rolodex but may now be extended through a website––www.mybestshot.com––and other Internet-opened opportunities.
Self-published nonfiction and fiction writers have recently scored some impressive successes. iUniverse authors, as well as those from other self-publishing companies, have seen their books generate first word-of-mouth then bookseller acceptance, strong sales, and even six-figure advances when taken over by trade publishers; at least one has achieved single-digit rank on the New York Times bestseller list.
There’s no reason why self-published poets shouldn't earn analogous success. For the time being most annual recognizers of literary excellence––the National Book Awards, the Pulitzers, for instance––will not consider books their authors paid to publish. But the day is bound to come when on demand books, which otherwise would never see the light in any readers eyes, will be routinely judged by the destinations they achieve and not their provenance. Like many other once-slanted playing fields in American life, here’s one more that should be leveled: open-mindedness to an author backing his or her literary ambition once was routine in America. Think––and thank––Walt Whitman, whose first book, Song of Myself, was self-published as well as self-celebratory.
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