The Fire, Steven Manuel
New Books/New: The Journal of American Poetry,
2023
Poet Steven Manuel’s first full collection, The Fire, is poetry verging towards—if not outright embracing and rooted within—occult underpinnings of Modernism. This is an approach towards the poem few employ these days. Manuel, however, admirably stays the course, brazenly heading off into the currently unexplored territory. The results are terrific.
Manuel risks accusations of haughty pretension, as some will find his poetry mired in obscure references, often utilizing language in an arcane manner, yet he shows little care or concern for whether readers are interested in following where he’s gone or capable of appreciating what he’s returned with. He’s too busy recording what he discovers of interest to his own ear coursing along the avenues of his reading and listening.
He conjures and accepts guidance from
his own poems.
“The flame in his voice, then,
turned me round
in the mirror,
nitid moon night lets hang
beside me.” (69)
(Note:
“nitid”= Bright, shining; polished, glossy. per the OED.)
Manuel achieves an exacting textual richness.
Evident of how he reads as means of looking to understand, i.e. hear. Even at the barest of syntactical
levels churning out richly imbued syllabics.
“SONG TOWARD NIGHT: THE OMEN
aul eve lae den lor carmina
hym tuneye men rust per age
level lies mine eye, sticht oer.
(fr. Ausonius’ BISSULA)” (36)
Here naming his source text, it’s of interest to learn, after doing a bit of on-line searching, that the ancient Latin poet Ausonius (310-395) wrote the poem “Bissula” praising the servant woman of that name whom he had freed from slavery. Clearly love of a sort is a theme intended. In the harsh visual image of “mine eye, stitcht oer” (stitches sealing over one’s eye) a Blues song such as “blood in my eyes for you” might be heard.
With the poem “GROUPED WORKS OUT OF
EURIPIDES, HUGH OF FOUILLOY, BION, HERODOTUS, PINDAR, DANTE, HOMER, PEIRE
VIDAL, & LORCA”. (64) the title alone gives clear sense of the range of
historical works from out which Manuel’s poems arrive. “Out of” here might span
in meaning from finding inspiration to outright directly lifting words from the
historical text to graph out the poem heard emerging. As with the following
closing lines of another poem where all the words come in toto from out the
1921 Field Book of Wild Birds and Their
Music by Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews (a quick search via Googlebooks
revealed this). Manuel might plausibly be seen to align Matthews’s words within
principles of William Carlos Williams’s thoughts regarding The American Idiom,
a poetry particular to patterns of North American speech.
“‘Being English, his song is a possible rendering
of Thomson’s
‘Come gentle spring’;
but to the American ear
his tongue is
hopelessly twisted,
which affliction
may be
due in part
to the
violence
of the American
spring.’” (72-73)
It’s easy enough to hear Williams in “violence//of
the American//Spring” echoing, as it does, his title Spring & All (1923) containing the well-known epithet “the pure
products of America go crazy”.
Regularly composing in poem-sequences,
akin to the serial poem, Manuel brings an often sparse, fragmentary feel to the
work, individual poem titles are a rarity, often with touches of Imagism spread across,
“owls perched in the arches / Asheville Transit”. (57) Never hesitating to give
bare, direct description. Which extends into emotional content as well. Again,
echoing Williams (“no ideas but in things”).
“gaudy, it had
the waves / of the sea
in it, her skirt,
as she / walked, etc,
across Goodwill parkinlot” (98)
or
“beauty, hard servant,
they say, I once
popped you open
by a trash can
on
sleeping pills.” (96)
The classics arrive mixed in with
hanging round garbage down backstreets and out front the Goodwill store, explicitly
working-class settings. Likely breaking with expectations, Manuel seemingly
steps into poetry from outside standard literary confines. His listening is
absolute in its assuredness, recognizing with whom he’s playing alongside.
“What birds
populate
—catch
the mime—
the trees
, pines, poplars; …
A bliss of thrall
(“For Cecil Taylor”)” (86)
And again, whittling away at the words
to pare down the image to its core essentials.
“thickest
thickets
thickset
with
stars” (48)
Manuel welcomes the poem as enchantment.
Imbuing our era with alchemical glow from out another time when the words of a
poem led not to imagined shores of an individual’s personal concerns but rather
broadened out to encompass and alter the scope of an entire community’s
conceptions of reality. From a perspective when hidden meanings lay occluded in
plain sight of extraordinary speech.
“Apollo hiding his sun.
Hermes aflame in his laughter,
picker of locks,
director. ‘The white cypress’—
map carousel
(you learned it as
infant).
There is a river there.
Prayer and a field,
chant and subterranean
skies
to walk under
as you chant.
Clarities
sounding anemoes.
Renew calumny, work
plain speech to strange speech.
Simonides
among sparrows.
The green eyes
in the mesh.
Apollo
hiding his sun.”
(“Hear the Bard” / Od. 13.9 [for Charles Segal]) (41)
The Fire offers readers the opportunity to glimpse that world of poetry once again. A poetry wherein the stakes are nothing less than essential and necessary. One that leads the poet to ask himself:
“Is my bow for killing
or to
sing
to?” (45)
And never fully be sure of the answer.
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Patrick James Dunagan recently edited Roots & Routes: Poetics at New College (w/ Lazzara & Whittington) and David Meltzer’s Rock Tao. City Bird and Other Poems (City Lights) is forthcoming. He reviews regularly for Rain Taxi and other venues.