Commentary |

on Deal: New and Selected Poems by Randall Mann

Deal: New and Selected Poems gathers together a selection of poems from Randall Manns five books, along with 21 new poems. Deal works equally well as a retrospective or an introduction to Mann’s work, where in the table of contents alone, poem titles accrue and cohere across time, as full of repetition and turns as a Randall Mann poem. Titles like “Against Metaphor” indicate that language will be considered closely and satirically; “Pantoum” reminds us Mann is a formalist; titles including names from Koestenbaum to Ovid show Mann in ongoing conversation with poets; “September Elegies” and “The Summer Before the Student Murders” establish him as a poet of witness; and numerous titles present Mann as a poet of place. The geographic places recurring most frequently in Mann’s work, San Francisco and Florida, overlap and play against each other, with an early-90s Florida lingering in his memory as a “lush, malicious landscape” (Boston Review). Mann is a poet of both place and displacement, but perhaps more accurately, he is a poet of landscape — of physical landscapes, but also cultural ones: queer life, the world of poetry, and language itself.

Geographer Tim Cresswell writes: “Landscape is an intensely visual idea. In most definitions of landscape the viewer is outside of it. This is the primary way in which it differs from place. Places are very much things to be inside of” (Place: A Short Introduction, 2004). Aligned with these geographical definitions, a position of distance can be observed in Mann’s poem “The End of Landscape” where the speaker says “everything is truer at a remove —” (Breakfast with Thom Gunn, 2009). Mann has said, “One thing perhaps I share with my speakers is a desire to connect with the world, and an innate separateness that I cannot seem to shake” (The Rumpus). Repeated themes of otherness and outsider status weave through Mann’s books, across a career which he described to The Adroit Journal in 2021 as “one long conversation.”

In Mann’s new poems, we see familiar terrain and landmarks, including love and sex between men. Time marks these new poems in subtle ways from wildfires, to lockdown, and more references to midlife, a theme of his most recent collection A Better Life (Persea, 2021) with its breathtaking title poem containing the iconic lines: “You say my gray, it makes / me look extinguished.” The new poems appear as the first section in Deal, and include pandemic-era pieces about staying in for “this year’s Pride” (“The Past”) and one for D.A. Powell where “California / is on fire” and “there is no music / anymore” (“September”). This new and selected collection allows for a layering of the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics across Mann’s body of work, from plague to plague, drawing our attention back to a crisis that never really ended: Fear lives in the chest / like results.” In “The Lone Palm,” a poem dedicated to Kevin Killian from A Better Life (2021):

 

— It’s sentimental,

some say,

to allude

to the plague.

The indignities

of the eighties

and the nineties,

an urn

 

on the mantel.

Keep it vague

because

it’s over.

It’s never

over.

If it were,

we would all

 

be at the Lone Palm …

 

Randall Mann queers midlife by surviving into it, in the wake of the American epidemic that stole whole generations of role-models, teachers, lovers, and friends. Although spared from earlier generations’ experiences of devastating losses, Mann acknowledges, to Boston Review, “there are times when I think I haven’t fully recovered from sexually coming of age” during a time when “sex felt like suicide.” Mann adds, “This stays with me, and the things I can’t shake often, sometimes, maybe, become poetry.” When asked by The Kenyon Review about queering form” and regarding “what can be accomplished when queerness and lyric structures reflect one another,” Mann responds “I embrace this construct; in particular, I like [Rickey Laurentiis’s] designation of ‘troubling’ a form to queer it, which gets to the heart of the ‘queer,’ which I see as an inclusive designation of an outsider.”

Other poets show up frequently in Mann’s work, from the way he gathers up a poetic lineage via allusion, to epigraphs that operate as portals, to the way he borrows a line as a formal device. “Poem Beginning with a Line from John Ashbery” begins, “Jealousy. Whispered weather reports. / The lure of the land so strong it prompts / gossip: we chatter like small birds / at the edge of the ocean gray, foaming” (Complaint in the Garden, 2004). “Poem Beginning with a Line by Wayne Koestenbaum” opens, “Airports are gay bars in denial,” and in the middle, appears and repeats the haunting line: “The repetition of the word terminal. Milosz appears often, and Thom Gunn, of course, in poems from Breakfast with Thom Gunn (University of Chicago Press, 2009), as well as in other books. Florida Again” from A Better Life begins with an epigraph from Gunn: “I forgave myself for having had a youth.” The poem recalls the speaker’s acid wash jeans and Trapper Keeper, at the mall “haunting / the magazine rack. / Ripping out pages / of Blueboy,” and ending with:

 

How

did I

 

even

learn how to live

in 1991?

Landlocked,

 

cockblocked,

Spanish moss

festering.

I forgive him.

 

 

Poets at times appear as symbols, such as in “Cockroach,” queering gender with “I was gated. I played / with my Anne Sexton / action figures; I played adolescence.” The image of Anne Sexton action figures calls up the Sexton line “But I was tired of the gender of things” from her poem “Consorting with Angels.” A new poem,“In the Beginning,” starts with a Laura Jensen epigraph, “I am sorry. I am sorry. But I am gone,” and in the fourth stanza, “he” is “Monstrous and hurt, / another Robert Lowell.” Finding out more about this “he” (“There was a man. / Who spun saccharine / turns of phrase, / burns on the lips”), involves a lengthy Laura Jensen scavenger hunt. Hint: the epigraph comes from Jensen’s poem There Was a Woman” (Memory, 1982).

About “Larkin Street,” which among other allusions, ends with the Philip Larkin phrase “pretending to be me,” Mann tells The Rumpus: “When I say ‘I am so sick / of pretending to be me,’ it’s exhaustion at the everyday performance, in life, in art, even in our most intimate encounters.” Elsewhere Mann says, “This poem, all poetry, begins and ends in allusion, which is another word, I think, for complication” (32 Poems). Allusion as complication leads me to the epigraph of Deal, which is the last line of Bill Knott’s short poem “Humidity’s Tones”: “I dread the color of the answer Yes.”  Epigraphs must be taken seriously, as important instructions — and in this case, another scavenger hunt — on how to read a poem, or book of poems. In thinking about Bill Knott and what his presence might mean here, there is a through line in the mix of irreverence and respect for poetry that Knott embodied, whose acts of performance throughout his career — his early pen name, St. Geraud, and feigned posthumous status; a letter to a magazine claiming he had died “a virgin and a suicide”; his chat room antics and vast self publishing — could all be seen as contributions of complication to contemporary poetry. Regardless, Knott’s line is beautiful, and takes on a new life in Mann’s poem “Luck,” and as the door that opens into Deal. While Mann at times irreverently jabs at the business of words, as Sexton called it, he shows reverence toward his poetry teachers and predecessors. The tenderly elegiac “Beginning & Ending with a Line by Michelle Boisseau” honors his teacher and friend, who died in 2017: “What kind of end of the world is this, / with no new poems from you?”

Some of Mann’s allusion seems to indict, or challenge, a poetry world that often operates more like a business than an incubator of talent, or preserver of art and culture. However, these gestures toward obscurity, otherness, and outsiders do not promote a feel-good poetry inclusiveness in rebellion of precision, craft, and excellence. On the contrary, Mann has said, “I am only interested in using language and form as meticulously and ruthlessly as possible. Period” (Copper Nickel). He demonstrates this ruthlessness with every poem in Deal, where “A poem / is staged / like home; / sunk, / like cost; / a ladder / like the color yes” (“Luck”).

Just as poem is a made thing, and poetry a performance, Mann presents language as a semantic landscape where, like Adam with the power to name, we too can distinguish one animal from another. Sometimes the right words do not exist, such as in “A Walk in the Park” where The weeds / like all the right / wrong words. / or none.” Mann describes the act of writing as “the loss of self to try — miserably, fruitlessly, movingly — to find it” (The Adroit Journal). In his essay The Illusion of Intimacy: Discovering John Ashbery,” Mann writes of a “yoking of landscape and language” in Ashbery’s poem “Some Trees.” Mann also accomplishes this feat of yoking the two together, especially in “The End of Landscape” where “the hot wind in the leaves was language, / Spanish moss — dusky, parasitic — / an obsession: I wanted to live in it.”

“The duende of poetry, metaphor, describing the thing in terms of something it is not, is political. The leap of faith of seeing the world and having the audacity to rearrange and reveal and speak truth to power by representing it as art, is political,” Mann told The Adroit Journal. Across Mann’s work, metaphoric language about language abounds, for example in the poem “A New Syntax,” a pantoum, where “Like a cup of alphabet soup, / the letters refuse to add up.” In an earlier poem, “Syntax,” Mann describes a 90’s Gainesville club where “Once in, one ate, in designated order, / a few choice letters of the alphabet … // I took a choking drag of a clove.  / The letters tasted bitter, like love.” In “Pantoum,” Mann likewise pairs love and language:

 

If there is a word in the lexicon of love,

it will not declare itself.

The nature of words is to fail

men who fall in love with men.

 

It will not declare itself,

the perfect word. Boyfriend seems ridiculous:

men who fall in love with men

deserve something a bit more formal.

 

The perfect word? Boyfriend? Ridiculous.

But partner is … businesslike —

we deserve something a bit less formal,

much more in love with love.

 

After considering other inadequate words — lover, roommate, friend — the poem ends with “The nature of words is to fail.” Queerness, in its proximity to the failure of words (within a love lexicon made by a heteronormative society), may result in a greater understanding that words fail to mean what they are supposed to, period.

In his ongoing search for “all the right / wrong words. / or none,” Randall Mann demonstrates how poetic forms can be productive places from which to ruminate and evade easy answers. “I think the best poetry resists explanation and lingers as part of that resistance,” Mann tells Fourteen Hills. Even from inside the queer mecca of San Fransisco, Mann finds value (or valuable resistance) in a position of looking in from the outside: “In the distance, the Golden Gate —” and at the top of Dolores Park, “The view / from here / ruthless — / more or less // We play a game / of name / the building / that was razed.” Place is essential in Mann’s work, and seeing his work in this format of new and selected re-establishes this fact in a meaningful way. The foil of Florida and San Francisco, across Mann’s career, takes on a greater significance against the current backdrop of Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ bills. However, an undeniable continuity emerges as well, from place to place across the poems. A multi-place poet has the power to thread a cohesive story of being across regions and borders, with each region’s varying amounts of restriction and freedom, community or alienation, and present unifying truths about the difficulty in assembling a life, especially a queer one. History is not linear, and neither are our lives a story of linear progress, as evidenced by the brilliant tension of age 45 sounding “like the hinge / of a better life: / It is, and it is not.” Maybe Mann is neither inside nor outside a sense of place, but queering the definition of landscape to create “an inclusive designation of an outsider.”

 

[Published by Copper Canyon Press on May 9, 2023, 144 pages, $20.00 paperback]

Contributor
Morgan English

Morgan English is the recipient of The Florida Reviews 2021 Editors Award in Poetry. Her poetry and reviews have recently appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine and Heavy Feather Review. Morgan holds a BA in creative writing from Florida State University. Originally from Florida, she lives, works, and writes in southern Vermont, where she is an MFA candidate at the Bennington Writing Seminars.

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