Kaleidoscope of the Exquisite Self:
Weingarten’s The Four Gentlemen and their Footman
by Marcus Cafagna
Dorothea Lasky, interviewed in The Missouri Review, describes the ontological challenge of recreating the self in a poem as “a Frankenstein thing ...you’re never gonna just—pssst—put your self in there. You have to do a mosaic or a bricolage thing where you’re putting all these pieces together, stitching them, trying to create a self.” Roger Weingarten has said much the same. “The Four Gentlemen and their Footman” is his postmodern take on the High Modernist method of composition—his multilayered meditation on the nature of being Weingarten—in five linked sestinas, the form that comes closest to approximating the social and psychological pressures of modern life, with its verbal density and Cubist separation of space.
Instead of appealing to sentimentality, Weingarten trumpets a vision of one man’s world played out in lines that metaphorically sweep the canvas of The Four Gentlemen ink wash flower paintings of classic Chinese art. The poet regales us with a series of fragmented dramatic scenes, many involving jealousy or lust, which seek to reanimate former lovers and wives with literary allusions (“...ditched a robust life to join my theater of the absurd”); to dismiss family ghosts (“...flipped my little brother out the second story window into a flying ritual motif”); and put a self-aggrandizing poet-critic in his place with a scatological sucker punch. Weingarten handles subjects like separation, death, and divorce with a sense of, if not Chinese, then second-generation Ashkenazi Jewish tolerance. This poem sometimes reads like a letter, the lyric voice full of riddles and double entendre, occasionally in other languages, as if the mishaps of the poet’s life were the stuff of slapstick comedy—his objective correlative.
Should Weingarten be read like Pound, as having achieved, according to The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, “his effect not by purifying but by collocating diffuse material”? After all, what was Frankenstein’s creation, if not a hodgepodge creation of the alienated self, a Gothic Promethean novel reincarnated into a campy Hollywood horror flick, stitched together from fragments that were otherwise dead? Weingarten told InterPoezia that in the past his writing process involved: “My wife Kate...attending the Montreal Film Festival...around 30 flicks in 10 days not just for the fun of it, but to write....Sometimes a character in a film will turn a phrase that gets me on a roll....writing in the dark is a challenge because you don’t know whether or not you will be able to read your handwriting.”
In an interview in Conte, Weingarten redefines what many have incorrectly assumed was his straightforward autobiographical style as “autobiography in drag,” quoting Lee Iacocca: “One of the most important lessons I’ve learned...that if all you’re getting...is one point of view—usually your own point of view—you’ve got to worry.” Largely due to the novelistic structure of his second book, Ethan Benjamin Boldt, published in 1975 by Knopf, some critics, like Peter Stitt, reviewing The Vermont Suicides in Poetryi, have tagged Weingarten as a narrative poet. What’s missing from this analysis is the lyrical element in Weingarten’s work: the meditative, satiric, and love of wordplay. But, no matter how playfully rendered, the progression of a Weingarten poem most often turns its initial reading inside out (“Overlap: brother’s M.S./my heart disease/Rogered by overlapping medicated stents’ refrain”). Similarly, David Perkins, in Modernism and After, characterizes Alan Dugan’s writing process, a poet who greatly influenced Weingarten: “Introspection leads him to recognize morally bitter truths about himself (which are also truths about everybody).” What Weingarten lacks in modesty is made up for by a tensile bamboo-like strength that bends but does not break him in sorrow, as opening of “Pre-Posthumous 6-word Memoiresque in the Key of W” demonstrates:
Picture: daydream rowing backwards into reeds
Remember: moonlight frost on cracked windowpane.
Eyeball: short sleeve, snapped bra strap.
Portray: bad guy of her dreams.
Open: side door of burning house.
Shoot: floored knees weeping infidelity.
Like reading stage directions or movie subtitles, the rich language of the opening lines direct us toward what we don’t yet understand, render us speechless before a diorama of pivotal moments in the poet’s life. But Weingarten is an iconoclast: beset as he is on all sides with betrayal and infidelity, some his own, there are no sacred cows in his domestic history, from his parents’ divorce and separation from his sister, to the death of his father and—what’s worse—his mother’s disappointment at his choice of poetry over business.
In a Weingarten poem, self-pity is a form of suicide, so his speaker’s voice tends to oscillate between delight and uncertainty before downshifting into irony. Though he appears to shrug off guilt or grief by making jokes, make no mistake, he is a man caught up in the linear progression of life, that recognition of one’s own mortality (“Reader Dearest. Black or bloody stools? Shush...”). With haiku-like lines he summons forth a portrait of the artist that elucidates the disjunctive effect of our Western need to know ourselves through the eyes of others. Even though Weingarten’s brash tone and in-your-face honesty might not be perceived as very gentlemanly, he readily acknowledge his shortcomings (“Nonetheless: love, found and lost, daisy-chained/Through semi-adulterous decades of addlebrained/Horniness”).
Composed of a Dadaist inventory of found objects, sentence fragments, one-word sentences, this section plunges at the speed of its active verbs (“Picture,” “Remember,” “Portray,” “Shoot”). The traditional six-line stanza of each of the five sestina sections is launched in lines of Whitmanesque proportion and propulsion. Because he demands more of its structure, Weingarten has done more to reinvent the sestina than any American poet. He tests its limits with unanticipated patterns of end-rhyme. His end-words recur and metamorphose; even though he doesn’t repeat the same end-words verbatim. End-word “windowpane” becomes “acid rain,” “stent’s refrain,” “Padre’s domain,” “daisy-chained,” “addled brained,” and last but not least “chest pains.” The end-word becomes end-words fueled by rhyme, and as a consequence the reader feels the twist and turn of the lyric, the multiple hearts of the poem pounding almost out of control. His sestinas do more than pay homage to the troubadours. The imagery grows more tactile or auditory with the song of an “overlapping medicated stent’s refrain” and demonically funny with “Madre sends hearse to Padre’s domain.” As the sestina progresses it becomes clear just by following one pattern of rhyming words, that no matter how lost in lust or love the speaker becomes, no matter how he tries to distract himself—no matter how addlebrained—he finds his life has returned him to the scene or at least the circumstances of his father’s demise—now with chest pains of his own.
A Weingarten sestina—beyond unexpected interior and exterior patterns of rhyme and use of acrostics, and, in one section, double acrostics—uses the six end-words, not as stakes in the ground holding the poem in place but as transmuting language that builds story. Or, to look at it in another light, almost every end-word or arrival point is a point of departure, accomplishing what Barry Goldensohn calls “sustained ambiguity.” The more the poet searches for self-knowledge the more it eludes him in this messy Western life, where the nature of self, like a static recurring end-word, is a contradiction in terms.
In the West, we seldom reward virtuous behavior of the kind that traditional Chinese art held in such high esteem. Each sestina of “The Four Gentlemen,” invokes the metaphoric characteristics of a flower, or junzi, that corresponds to a season of life: summer is characterized as bamboo, a plant with a hollow stalk suggesting tolerance and strength; winter as plum blossom, its inner beauty showing through even under adverse conditions; spring as orchid, a flower of beauty and grace with a mild scent; and autumn (the coming of winter) as chrysanthemum, a flower whose rugged virtue withstands adversity.ii These traditional Chinese characteristics are developed in the poem to the degree that Weingarten has or has not lived up to the virtues associated with flowers and their seasons. The speaker’s effort to tolerate wrongs done to him and to stand tough against his adversaries ends with the recognition of his own mistakes and limitations as a human being. Such is also the case in the tornada that resolves the “Memoiresque” sestina:
Overspill: chest pains--O spousal beefs
Force de frapped: inside daydreams, regardless
Warts venereal: ghost-thoughts. Adios, puta madre.
Puta madre is meant here in the affectionate sense between friends, but its farewell does signal the beginning, as expressed by the speaker, not only of a first-person point-of-view but of the self’s separateness from the world of others and from itself through divorce, aging and the contemplation of death. Weingarten has a comedian’s touch for cracking a joke, or lightening the mood, before a poem ends. These sestinas were probably inspired by one of his writing exercises, “Corpse of the Exquisite Sestina,” from a seminar he taught for the Vermont College M.F.A. program entitled “Reincarnated Forms,” those defined as “appropriated, invented, hybridized or bastardized.”iii One of the defining features of this sequence of “Metamorphic” sestinas is that many of its lines are much longer than the traditional metrical line of five accented syllables, increasing its emotive or meditative trajectory across its 39-line structure.
i In his review of The Vermont Suicides, in Poetry, January 1980, pp. 229 - 30, Stitt describes Weingarten as “narrative (not a descriptive, not a meditative) poet fond of exploring the history, real and imagined, of his adopted state.”
ii Two websites that are especially helpful in delineating virtues and characteristics that Chinese painting has traditionally associated between certain flowers or plants and the four seasons are Four Gentlemen Chinese Painting (chinaonlineuseum.com) and Four Gentlemen—Bamboo, Chrysanthemum, Plum Blossom, Orchid (annesteinman.com).
iii In “An Interview with Roger Weingarten” in InterPoezia, #3, pp. 2 - 3, Weingarten discusses a class he taught at Vermont College and the issue of Hunger Mountain for which he edited a special section entitled “Reincarnated Forms.”