Speaking in Forked Tongues, John Crutchfield, CAROLINA QUARTERLY
Readers of Barbara Hamby's first full-length collection, Delirium (1994), which won not only theVassar Miller Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, but also the Poetry Society of America's Norma Faber First Book Award, may have noticed something odd about the book even as they admired it: while the poems are thematically unified by their setting (Italy), they vary widely in terms of tone and even poetic technique. It is difficult to imagine that the writer of the book's first two sections--who comes across as a kind of poetic troublemaker, a brilliant and self-deprecating buffoon--could also have written the last section, entitled "The Anatomy of John Keats," a poly-vocal collection of dramatic and epistolary poems relating to the death of the young English poet, and surely one of the more impressive elegiac cycles in American poetry since John Berryman's tribute to Delmore Schwartz in The Dream Songs. When Hamby's second book, The Alphabet of Desire, appeared several years later (itself winner of the 1998 New York University Press Prize), it was clear which poet was the real Barbara Hamby. She is a comedienne in the classic Baudelairean sense, showing humanity in its most characteristic existential act: slipping on a banana peel. In Hamby's world, the human being distinguishes herself from the other animals by being ridiculous; for despite all her immortal aspirations and poetic longings, despite her magnificent flights of intellect, in the end she hangs pinned and wriggling on her own mortality and fallibility. For truly, every action has its equal and opposite reaction.
This drama is repeated with variations in one poem after another and to hilarious effect, such that the book itself reads like nothing so much as a transcript of the poetry slam going oil next door to Plato's Symposium. With few exceptions, the poems seem to have burst forth fully formed from the heat-oppressed brain of some secular sibyl, or rather, some over-sexed prodigy in comparative linguistics. The lines read like inspired improvisations: they are long all right, but not as long as the syntax itself, which keeps heaping its accumulated cultural plunder onto the word-hoard, until the whole becomes a sort of verbal equivalent of Phil Spector's "wall of sound." The rhythms are relentless and ineluctable, the absurdity infectious, and the overall effect a veritable bacchanalia of language and cultural reference:
In the beginning was the word and it was as big
as Aretha Franklin after "Chain of Fools,"
long as your mother's memory of all your misdeeds,
wide as Jerusalem, a fat-lady-in-the-circus word,
a Siberia, a steppe, a savanna, a stretch, a Saturnalia,
the party at the end of the world. ("The Word")
Here as virtually everywhere in Hamby's work, the lines unfold as a series of images apparently linked by association or metonymy alone, or in some cases by pure phonetic accident, as in the alliterating "s'-sounds above. The sentences likewise are almost always paratactic (and sometimes even "run-on"), with the consequence that no single element or image seems subordinate to any other. Instead, what we get appears at first to be merely a continuous stream of the most varied and scintillating language. This "leveling" effect, moreover, is the quintessence of the comic spirit: phenomena from widely different and often conventionally opposed realms of experience and discourse are placed side-by-side in surprising—and absurd—contiguity. Even when Hamby lights upon a religious motif, as in "The Word," it is generally with playful irreverence--if not to say blasphemous glee.
And yet one occasionally glimpses, scattered among these coups de bouffonnerie, a different spirit, raw and sudden, grief-exposed and angry. These moments (and they are admittedly rare) express an almost elegiac pity for that very human consciousness whose only means of survival is language, and whom we see the rest of the time "languaging" so desperately. In "The Hunter," for example, a surprisingly candid elegy for Lynn Fiedeldey, Hamby writes,
With the wide sky
for flight, how have you tumbled into this bowl of ash?
With the long night for sleep, why have you squandered
your breath?
In the new book, Babel, these flashes of compassion and grief subside into an undercurrent, which, though never rising to the surface as sometimes happens in The Alphabet of Desire, nevertheless suffuses the whole with an elegiac atmosphere. In Babel, Hamby's characteristic irony is somehow less rampant, and hence less nihilistic, than in the earlier book, though the hilarity is undiminished, and the relentless verbal energy is even (if that's imaginable) cranked up a notch. In many of the strongest poems, Hamby's technique is to begin in the satiric mode and at full speed, then gradually to morph into the elegiac. And this is done with a subtlety, a lightness of touch, and an authenticity of emotion that is close to masterful. As often as not, that emotion is a kind of self-estranging shock at the mystery of lived time:
and when I see myself
in bus windows or store glass, the shock never wears off,
for I recognize myself and see a stranger at the same time,
because the minutes are racing by at the speed of light,
and I am saying goodbye to Paris, to everyone, to myself
most of all, watching her disappear down the rue Jeanne d'Arc,
and what can she possibly be thinking as she walks
to the movies in the middle of this afternoon of her life?
("The Tawdry Masks of Women")
Babel seems to answer its predecessors in a number of other ways as well. Like both Delirium and The Alphabet of Desire, the new book is divided into three sections. Whereas the poems of the two earlier books had largely been set in various Italian locales, many of these are set in Paris. (The second section is entitled "13 Ways of Looking at Paris.") And where The Alphabet of Desire's third section is entitled "Italian Odes," the third section of the new book is "American Odes," which contains the dazzling "Ode to Barbecue," a narrative poem about a quixotic quest for "the best barbequed ribs in the universe." The poem begins in medias nihili, as it were: "We are lost again in the middle of redneck nowhere, / which is a hundred times scarier / than any other nowhere because everyone has guns. / Let me emphasize that plural ..." On the surface, then, and from a purely formal point of view, the new book is cut from the same cloth as the earlier work: we have the same tripartite structure, the same long lines, the same lexical exuberance, the same syntactic surfeit. But in the new book, Hamby is doing something different with the tone, something suggestive of a more mature sensibility, one that takes as much delight
in subtlety as in scintillation, in evasion as in self-display.
The opening poem, “My Translation,” is a stunning performance; and it is soon followed by "Idolatry," surely one of the scariest and at the same time funniest love-poems one is likely to find in contemporary poetry:
My Baal, shimmering Apollo, junkyard Buonarroti,
funkadelic malocchio, voice shouting
from the radio, talking about love, about heartbreak,
about doing everything you can till you cain't do
no more. Then you float by in a Coupe de Ville,
hair conked, wearing the mink stole
of delicious indifference, reciting the odes
of Mr. John Keats like you was his best friend.
One difficulty confronting any reviewer of Hamby's poetry is the problem of what to quote. In some ways, this is due to the nature of her poetics itself: no single image or line or passage or poem seems more important than any other, since all are swept up in the rush of Hamby's sibylline swoon. But the other problem is that it's all just so good. One is reminded of Allen Ginsberg at his best, except that Hamby is a smarter poet than Ginsberg, more learned and less self-aggrandizing; her mastery of the craft is more accomplished and her ear for the spoken language more fine-tuned. And for that matter, she simply has more of the language under her belt. Likewise, her rhythms, though utterly compelling, are not Hebraic, nor does their maker aspire to rival Whitman or, for that matter, Jeremiah. The unity of a Hamby poem does not depend upon anaphora or syntactic parallelism, much less on mere listing (although one finds these phenomena), but derives instead from the poem's dramatic shape. These poems are meant to be spoken and heard. The soundscapes are finely wrought, the voice consistent, the turns of phrase and of thought surprising and yet instantly right. And the range of human experiences and emotions invoked is harmonious in itself, if not exhaustive. Like some of the best poetry in the language, Hamby's work arises from--even when it does not appear directly to express--a longing to embrace this hopelessly physical life in its fullness, by the only means finally available: these incorrigibly forking tongues.