Another notable characteristic that ups the ante of his sestina’s lines and many of its sentences is the double vision of his truncated syntax. Separated by colons at mid-sentence, the sentences, or their fragments, can be read as one grammatical unit or two, heightening tension and meaning, reminiscent of fabulist literature that casts realistic experience in a surreal light. Weingarten’s loose adherence to an iambic rhythm grounds his soaring syntax: “What drives my free verse is what I call The Elastic Sentence,” a syntactical creation Weingarten has compared to a two-hearted earthworm, “a relativist creature of the Ensteinian universe,” while “the Line reflects linear...Newtonian thinking.”iv
While the “plum blossom” section, “Side Effects That May Occur While Reading This,” is an epistolary directed at the reader, he uses this approach to entice the reader onstage to participate in the action: “If you, my visitant, wouldn’t mind, take a giant step//North toward memory’s rat-tooth-grasping forceps.” At times, it reads like diary entries, newspaper headlines, and phrases that almost mimic a text or Tweet in their brevity and pithiness: “Nipper proved unreal yet present even so. It’s late/’45. Forceps. Bris. Glorious tushy, posed plum blossoms conjure/Son of Mike who talked to strangers. Gone dark.” The sestina ends like a movie: melded to the epistle it’s as if the letter or life has come to an abrupt halt.
In “Curtain Lecture Reversal” the curtain rises on a dramatized relationship reminiscent of understanding what went on: “Chloe, your eyelids clenched under the pillow’s marital undress rehearsal/And your right cheek, like an orchid, blushed if I said a bad word.” Here, poking fun at the purity and modesty of the orchid—symbol of spring, season of grace—Weingarten turns his attention from childhood experiences, his mother and her preoccupations, toward four women in what—given the acrostic that spells out their names and his take on their relationships—presents itself as a four-level, sometimes self-skewering, conflicted, satiric, and impassioned Roman a clef. Here’s a representative passage: “Lust, a hot chick on a stick, fell apart. Me too. Fidelity to a bedswerving draggle-tail/Ewe shepherded me to court numéro trois where I couldn’t forgive the unforgivable.” David Hume, in “A Treatise of Human Nature,” takes issue with the notion that we are the same human being, the same static unchanging self throughout our lives, writing that, “our imagination runs easily from one idea to any other that resembles it.” In “Curtain Lecture Reversal” Weingarten demonstrates how a lack of self-awareness can lead to loneliness and isolation, make us strangers to ourselves: “Note the years, my rictal vis à vis turning rage into a hurled cereal box’s free verse.”
In “Lives of a Moonshine Formalist,” plunged into a debate that has plagued poetry, the reader needs a chrysanthemum’s courage, as ancient Chinese painting would have it, to endure a cold wind. Robert Hass, in his essay on prosody, “Listening and Making,” characterizes one of the central differences between metrical and free verse poems: “...most metrical poems, by establishing an order so quickly, move almost immediately from the stage of listening for an order to the stage of hearing it in the dialogue with itself. They suppress animal attention in the rush to psychic magic” whereas “the free-verse poem insists on the first stage of sensual attention, of possibility and emergence—which is one of the reasons why it has seemed fresher and more individual to the twentieth century.”
Hass contrasts the “prophetic poems” of Modernists W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot to those of W. C. Williams and Ezra Pound of the Cantos who “by stripping away familiar patterns of recurrence” kept the poem’s “options open,” and better prepared it for “multiple possibilities” of closure and “to find its way to the right one.” When one considers Hass’ analysis, it becomes clear how Weingarten has employed Chinese brushstroke painting motifs. This poem touches upon the aesthetic and metrical quarrels between poets who have championed either open or closed form. A self-proclaimed “moonshine formalist,” he distills free verse until it intoxicates—a concoction as combustible as white lightning. A member of the second generation of postwar contemporary poets who came to the attention of the American public during a time of greater openness, Weingarten was joined by poets from diverse schools in revolting against the fixed metrical line and in exploring personal subject matter that poets of the New Criticism would not.
In this autumnal section of “The Four Gentlemen,” Weingarten, a metrically-literate free-verse poet, responds to one essay’s assault on open form that advised poets to exhibit a stricter adherence to the standard metrical line and to avoid certain “disturbing” subjects Eliot thought poorly-suited for good poetry:
In one, I scraped horsedookie: off the riding boots of a dwarf tag team wrestler.
When Leithauser excreted “Metrical Illiteracy” into The New Criterion every
jackleg poet had The New: Formalism like a cold sore on their lips.
Vladislov and I snowshoed forever up: the ramp of a handicapped lean-to.
Tucked in between his introductory incarnation as a dwarf horse-riding wrestler and a Russian school boy, this shot at the 1983 essay seems less an ad hominem critique than a bookmarked moment he and overlapping generations of “jackleg poet[s]” were compelled to grapple with.
In the last section, “Self-Portrait as The Magnificent Frigatebird,” Weingarten begins with this dramatic conceit: “This kleptoparasite, a. k. a. Man O’ War...En route to Woman Key, sanctuary for shipwrecked whore, I swallow baby turtle climbing a thermal.” The poet, as portrayed, is condemned to such heights: “I never alight—weak-legged glider—dive through that ultramarine crust.” The noun frigate is defined as either “a warship or a sailing vessel,” but the verb frig refers to “sexual intercourse” or “masturbation.” Add the literal bird piece and you’ve got three layers of extended metaphor: “I Lord Byron of Misrule,/graceless dust devil in reverse, circle and dive to this roosting mysterium//a wandering Jew zigzagging...kept aloft by forked tail and pointed wing.” Weingarten further decks himself out as an Elvis Presley bird. Similarly portrayed in Camille Paglia’s controversial literary study, Sexual Personae, she equates the bad boy crooner of devilish good looks who played hard and died young, with Lord Byron, that Romantic exile.
Although, clearly not the fifth gentleman, Weingarten’s Footman/Byronesque Elvis does recall the Eternal Footman of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” alluding to its author’s fears about mortality, his awareness that time is running out “between six years and sixty-seven,” Although the human being personified here has all of his hair and can still gyrate his hips, the self-interrogating questions that haunt him are reminiscent of the chilling internal monologue Eliot liked to employ: “Roger, are you pipedreaming a knife-toting bad guy floating mid-air? Are you your own Judas goat/trotting out—for birdwatcher glued to spotting scope—your Sagittarius sun conjoined with Mercury the thief?” Is this self-portrait as the Magnificent Frigatebird, like the “Floating Man” of philosophical thought, little more than aerial pirate; a figment of Weingarten’s Western imagination? With an energetic torsion of words he sounds an occidental note as opposed to an Oriental polyptych on how to live. In the West, most of our beliefs about ourselves are fictions, and the predatory circumstances under which we form a self lead us to self-appropriate, or to turn ourselves into “flying fish scrap.”
This act of bad faith, the astounding fact that we die without any real knowledge of ourselves, is the bane of our existence; one that poetry can address but not remediate. Only once we recognize this do we see life for what it is. Otherwise, Weingarten seems to be saying, we only circle, doomed to the almost-life we live, or like the Magnificent Frigatebird, sometimes “drop to forage drifting gulfweed for frogfish.” “Drifting gulfweed” appears to be the fifth gentleman, junzi, or self-deprecating footman: a free floating marine plant versus the four landlocked gentlemen—this Elvis/Byron marauder’s lovely phrase of choice and killing ground.
In the penultimate line of the poem Weingarten asks: “Am I blissfully dying of sperm poisoning on 10 pink milligrams of a serotonin-uptake inhibitor,/self-betrayed?” The tone is one of amusement, or gallows humor, with himself as the butt of the joke that turns with machine gun-like rapidity the spotlight away from his own version of self-betrayal to: “Mom playgirled Dad. Splitsville. Elvis Nutty Buddied into oblivion. Frig it. Word.” The consequences of his mother’s adultery and Elvis’ sweet gluttony, coupled with his pharmaceutical intake, bring the curtain down. Weingarten ends his “self-portrait” rhyming the last “Word” with the last word of the last section’s subtitle that ricochets his possible fate off Presley’s: dead on the can from cardiac arrhythmia and pharmaceutical poisoning.
iv In “An Interview with Roger Weingarten” in Conte Online, June 2013, p. 4, reprinted from the now defunct Emprise Review, December 2010, Weingarten discusses his Elastic Sentence in terms of the syntactical tension between the sentence and the line. For a deeper discussion of his ideas consult his essay, “Incidental Music: The Grotesque, the Romantic, and the Retrenched,” in Words Overflown by Stars, edited by David Jauss, Writer’s Digest Books 2009, pp. 353 - 362.
v Definitions of frigate and frig can be found in The American Heritage Dictionary, fourth edition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009, p. 704.
About the Author
Marcus Cafagna is the author of two books, The Broken World (University of Illinois 1996), a National Poetry Series selection, and Roman Fever (Invisible Cities Press 2001). His poems and critical reviews have also appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He lives in the Ozarks and coordinates the creative writing program at Missouri State University.