“O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!” a 30-year-old Ira Sadoff might have exclaimed, had he been a 22-year-old John Keats. Sadoff’s debut collection, Settling Down (1975), strongly sided with sensation. By no means devoid of ideas (primarily by means of a very sharp wit), the poetry mostly took as a given the waning period style’s devotion to the sensory (some might argue, extrasensory) image. And while his second book, Palm Reading in Winter (1978), in no way overlooked the word-root of imagination, its most exciting poems realized a contemplative mode of poetic speech in which rhetorical turns of mind behaved as richly as metaphors. Just over a decade ensued — one sizable chapbook, A Northern Calendar, intervened in 1982 — before his breakthrough, 1989’s Emotional Traffic. The startlingly durable poems in that collection, and in all subsequent volumes, have grappled, and sometimes brawled, with Keats’s hierarchy, yet always with an eye toward the broader vista: not sensation rather than thought, but instead — I steal this time from Dickinson — Circumference.
Sadoff’s ninth book, Country, Living, seems to me a consolidation and a culmination, attaining what Berryman praised in “Dream Song 324” as William Carlos Williams’s “mysterious late excellence.” I resist the finality of “late”; there’s more to come. As for “mysterious,” Sadoff’s poetry has always embraced the irrational — the nutrient that feeds spontaneity, experimentation, and improvisation — but it holds no allegiance to happenstance. An early reviewer who wrote that Sadoff “broods his books into being” got it right. Country, Living, does, however, arrive at a kind of resting place in the development of his poetry: after decades marked and driven by restlessness, by dissatisfaction with standing still, Sadoff (to employ one of the new book’s titles) finds “a moment’s calm.”
It takes a fair amount of turmoil to get there. The book’s opener, “Biographical Sketch,” delivers the multi-toned, at times atonal, polyphony typical of Sadoff’s mature style. In the first three stanzas, the speaker admits he’s an easy mark who can give a hard time (“I’ve been a soft touch, a rough ride”); concedes that liberal guilt can underwrite an overbearing largess (“[I] left an outrageous tip / for a waif whose hand was shaking / as she poured my tea”; takes an amused look at the slapstick antics of lust and jealousy’s petulance (“I made the sound of a wolf / in Naomi’s bedroom, was shabby / at her wedding”); and casts a cold eye on the hypocrisy of selective rectitude (“I refused to cross a picket line / then bought a handsome silk shirt // sewn in the most downtrodden district in China”). Not a pretty picture and not meant to be. A brief time-out allows for an earnest, if tentative, appeal to the jury — “This when I was learning how to be a person, / which even now’s an unfinished symphony” — before this warts-and-all specimen of humanity owns up to his place — same place for us all — in the one species we’re certain can foresee its own death:
But no one warned me about the solemn passages,
when we know no one, when we could die
far from home with our bungled furies and crushes
yammering beside us: Not yet not yet.
The modulation from “me” to “we” acknowledges that we’re each a part of the family of over-brainy hominids, but we’re also each apart, “far from home,” in our deathbed rages — in this case, pleadings — against the dying of the light.
Those “bungled furies and crushes // yammering” provide a compressed index to Sadoff’s persistent obsessions. An informed and eclectic music-lover, Sadoff knows when a poem’s language should produce feedback. “Bungled” calls up his unsentimental but empathetic attention to the ways humans screw up — arguably the central subject of literature. The burlesque clamor of the word — an ugly mash-up of the scatological “bung” with a mumbling suffix — makes plain how we’re often passive assholes (mis)led by, in large part, our own furies and crushes. As for those “furies,” Sadoff has written many bracingly infuriated poems, frequently but not always enraged by atrocities the powerful inflict upon the vulnerable. Those furies also summon the Eumenides that tormented the matricidal Orestes, suggesting the vexed familial dynamic that runs riot throughout Sadoff’s poetry. His fifth book, Grazing, opens with “My Mother’s Funeral,” brazenly written before his mother’s death.
The erotic and carnal meanings of “crushes” recur in every book as well — recently, and riotously, in “At the Polynesian Paradise in the Mall of America,” from True Faith (2012), a poem that starts off by relishing the sculpture the Plaster Casters made of Jimi Hendrix’s apparently monumental member. Sadoff’s wry affection for the intimate inanities of sex goes all the way back to Settling Down’s “My Last Two Wives,” who “loved everything / about potatoes” — a poem no more about the potatoes adored by its fictitious ex-spouses than Bishop’s “The Fish” is about a fish. The fuller embrace of Eros informs Sadoff’s plentiful, often candidly ambivalent love poems. From Emotional Traffic’s “My Wife’s Upstairs” to the current book’s “The Word Beautiful,” Sadoff’s love lyrics derive a special pathos from the tension between the urge to hold and be held, and the tendency to hold the beloved other at arm’s length. More strictly speaking, the etymological root system of “crush” — literally, to shatter, force down, or bruise; figuratively, to overpower or subdue — recalls his many poems that don’t look away from the power of violence and the violence of power. Finally, “Biographical Sketch” evidences Sadoff’s tough-minded, but not close-minded, atheism. When the poem’s “passages” dead-end at the not yet, not yet that these furies and crushes yammer — a petition to the Great Equalizer, not to the Prime Mover — there’s no expectation of an afterlife to the biography.
The disquiet of “Biographical Sketch” makes for a great opening salvo, and many books of poetry that begin with such a bang wouldn’t let up. But Country, Living is after more complex utterances, often braiding multivocal tones in the way that other poets — Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Susan Mitchell, et al. — plait strands of narrative. A poem’s plurality of voices can fruitfully clash, but they can also function sequentially, acting as links in a stabilizing spine, as it were, as thought and feeling course through the poem’s nervous system. “Self-Portrait with Michelangelo” counts among my favorite examples of this sort:
In the Star Theater of Rome, NY, I paint ceilings
on the ladder to heaven where the air is thin.
After a few brushstrokes I sit on the top rung
to savor the figures of light and shadow on screen.
I’ll want to save them — but also send some to an island
where they can’t beguile or terrify. It’s a revelation
to come out of the theater so absorbed by their voices
and grimaces, these acts of creation, translucent as we are,
substantial and eternal, a state of mind the body
can’t kill off, as when Liza’s away on Guadeloupe,
muse to herself only, I conjure her sketching a waterfall,
eating cassava and christophine, hoarding perfumes
and scarves in Pointe-à-Pitre. She’s all flashes
and cloudbursts; there’s infinitesimal movement
between the frames so you can’t register
the changes. I call her Liza so you’re attached to her
and the name Liza: she has reddish-brown hair
and green eyes, smiles too much and loves to swim
too close to sharks. I don’t want her
swallowed up by life itself. Because she’s
a complete stranger I’m endlessly curious:
isn’t that love, knowing and not knowing,
framing a gesture to make her familiar?
I make everything up: her jasmine scent,
the delicate powder on the screen of her forehead;
but how can I paint the streets and their screens,
to come back to earth with the darkness it deserves,
where I live with my ordinary friends, the divine?
Starting with a near-subliminal merger of the Sistine Chapel with the silver screen, the poem moves through its early frames with a lively associativeness, enthused by its “savorings” but nicely “top rung,” up-close to heaven’s ceiling but distanced enough to make a playful allusion to Rilke’s petrifying angels. If Whitman had had the movies, he might have similarly seen the “stars” on the screen as “acts of creation, translucent as we are.” What I find especially moving in these first nine lines are the quick-changes of attitude: commonsensical, aloof, appetitive, protective, self-protective, a touch fearful, surprised, intent, and (it feels to me) struck dumb by this “state of mind the body / can’t kill off.” With seemingly nowhere else to go, the poem reaches out, only to find and not find a loved one, there for the “conjuring” but “away” enough to be “muse to herself only,” her inaccessibility intensified by the accompanying exotic sounds and names. Liza’s “infinitesimal movement / between the frames so you can’t register / the changes” of course makes her a star, a movie star. One can imagine a poem following the path set out by this single pivot; after all, who’d pass up an extended fantasy vacation in Pointe-à-Pitre with Liza? Not the speaker; not the reader.
But it’s to the reader that the poem then turns, as if to seek assurance that our attachment to Liza — as both person and as name — authenticates the speaker’s own. From here on, the play of association raises its own stakes. Love and gentle misgivings weight every gesture, in one case by the use of a subversive enjambment (a Sadoff trademark): “I don’t want her / swallowed up by life itself”; in another instance by a worried (as I hear it) interrogation: “isn’t that love, knowing and not knowing, / framing a gesture to make her familiar?” The poem’s last five lines — a single sentence prolifically challenging to parse — start off by impersonating a well-behaved essay: the thesis — “I make everything up” — bolstered by concrete examples. But paradox disrupts exposition. If Liza’s “jasmine scent” and “delicate powder” exemplify what the speaker “make[s] up,” then do they verify or — being perfume and makeup — disguise her, especially given the speaker’s admission that he’s a serial fabricator? Love’s proof disproved. Poignantly shifting the subject, the sentence then morphs into an elaborately subordinated question, scumbling as much as “painting” its sequence of queries: what’s street-real and what’s screened; what’s dark and (for readers with good memories) what’s a “figure of light”; and, most crucially, where’s the best way (I intend the squinting grammar there) to be alive to our ordinary divinities: friends and lovers? It’s a beautifully probing instance of a poem feeling its way, thought by tentative thought. And without that vital address to the reader breaking the fourth wall — “I call her Liza so you’re attached to her” — we wouldn’t feel so spoken to, even implored, all through the complex syntax and rich indecisions of the last three stanzas. The speaker needs that verification of our attachment, both to his lover and to himself.
Many poems in the book’s first two sections open out and zero in like “Self-Portrait with Michelangelo.” Readers paying attention will have their own favorites. Mine include “Ode to the Defense Mechanism,” the capacious “Why Do We Make Things Up?” the agreeably not-mindful “Meditation,” the wistful fatalism of “Broken Sonnet for the Universe,” and three poems that interrelate in a prescient triptych concerning the unholy trio of American racism, class bigotry, and misogyny: “My Tulsa”; “The Defeat of Brooklyn”; and “Los Angeles, Downtown: 1958.” But even these strengths didn’t prepare me for the lambent unity of Section Three. This suite of 15 poems abounds with composers and musicians (I count nine). On the simplest terms, then, Sadoff pays homage to one of his most enduring loves. This section is also where the most matter-of-fact, direct, and sometimes deadpan (cf. Buster Keaton’s cameo in “Deathbed Confession”) locutions cluster. In a manner that signals another breakthrough, statements given form by unembellished speech rhythms embody a counterargument to this poet’s restive intelligence: intricate thinking, even if thought feelingly, carries the risk of echoing in a chamber of self-consciousness.
The section kicks off with “In the House of Wittgenstein,” doing to the philosopher (of mind, of mathematics, of language, of logic, of what you will) that which, I believe, ought to be done. Who would have thought to write a deliciously jokey prose poem about the perpetrator of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus? Using as its epigraph one of the treatise’s more specious propositions (and from a neurolinguistic viewpoint, conclusively disproven) — “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” — the poem launches a volley of curt ripostes, powered up by four of the five senses (all five if you include a whiff of a car muffler). It’s a great strategy for giving the lie (or perhaps the finger) to the epigraph, as well as validating the world at its most vibrantly nonlinguistic. One quip brushes up against Stevens’s early extravagances — “We’d like to see him stroke a cat wrapped in a kaftan” — but in the end the joke’s on the poet, Ira Sadoff. Refusing to take cover in the guise of “the speaker” — a poetic shibboleth often as dubious as Wittgenstein — the poem’s closing paragraph asks: “What’s to be done with a man who lives in his head? Ira, my friend, are you listening?” When I got to that final sentence, I laughed. Wittgenstein is the main man who holes up in his head, of course. But in a sly coup de théâtre, a voice out of nowhere (the poem’s “real” speaker from behind the arras?) turns to the poet, and “outs” him, with one lightly taunting question, as a fellow brainiac. It’s a truly dizzying moment of self-awareness, Sadoff performing mind games with his own intellect, and naming names. More poets should try playing Gotcha with themselves.
One way to convey Section Three’s governing sensibility is to assemble a few more or less free-standing passages (properly, they’re best read in situ, of course). One hears the matter-of-factness in the lines that frame “In Vienna,” which opens with “Schubert and I were walking through the woods/hand in hand,” and ends, disarmingly, with “Schubert, my friend from another century.” Directness inheres in “I’m just working hard, learning how to listen,” from the laconically titled ”Music.” As for deadpanning, “I could have used more bliss” helps give “Deathbed Confession” its Keaton-esque poker face. “A Moment’s Calm” provides the line that perhaps best articulates the presiding tone: “maybe I’ve been waiting all my life for this.”It overstates the case to claim that these samples represent “Sadoff unplugged,” and severing them from their contexts risks libeling him as a “wisdom poet.” In fact, it’s in such crystalline simplicities that one senses his long-standing, widely read devotion to international poets, especially Andrade, Herbert, Parra, Pessoa, Szymborska, and scores of others for whom poetry was always a three-part accord between metaphor, reflection, and plainspoken feeling. One more, and more concrete, excerpt —from “The Word Beautiful,” the book’s penultimate poem — might best capture the resonant quiet that Country, Living comes to discover: “that stillness: a stone fence/before the old house.” From “emotional traffic” — a fit emblem for Sadoff’s edgy first maturity — to “stillness,” there’s an expressive storyline linking those two poles. It brings to mind the “plain sense of things” we find in late Stevens, his “essential gaudiness” trimmed back to clear space for his own unadorned excellence. No doubt there will be more furies and crushes from Ira Sadoff, but his readers can also look forward to further, deeper oases of repose.
[Published June 30, 2020 by Alice James Books, 100 pages, $16.95 paperback]