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The Imaginary Poets,
edited by Alan Michael Parker
Review by Molly McQuade
"What matters is the poem, not the poet," wrote Maxine Kumin a few years ago, but the interesting premise of Alan Michael Parker's anthology upsets that argument. Parker asked twenty-two living, English-speaking poets each to invent a fictitious poet who wrote or writes in a language other than English. He also invited each contributor to compose a biographical sketch for and critical essay about this poet. Finally, he commanded each to translate one of the fictional poet's poems into English. The result is The Imaginary Poets.
Like the melancholy Portuguese modernist imp Fernando Pessoa, who compiled a herd ofimaginary poets and their poems-among them, an English sonneteer wittily named Alexander Search-Parker is not only asking us to envision another poetry. He's also asking poets to become someone else when they write. Parker's mischievous ambition makes this the sort of book about which one might want to write a book oneself.
Assuming a new identity means casting yourself in the plural, probably with a jolt. Pessoa evoked the feeling of that jolt when he confided, in The Book of Disquiet, "Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quite valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one." Being no one, a writer might crave others, create them, and inhabit them. Whether or not American writers feel the same anomie, Parker's anthology seems timely for our confessional era, offering a provocative alternative. Besides, the placid sameness of successive volumes by some of our contemporary "unimaginary" poets suggests that a jolt may be needed, even if it interrupts the work of a career.
Parker's poets mostly ride out the jolt with good grace. Thom Ward, for example, invents a poet of whom he writes: "Plodding and deliberate, Jan DeKeerk's poetic output over the last four decades has been relatively small, considering that his first book, These Fingers Are Made of Rum, was originally published in Flemish in 1966." At one stroke of that confident opening sentence, it's possible to believe not only in such fingers but in the poem they have penciled, which includes the jauntily credible lines:
. . . Spiders write
bad checks across the ceiling.
Fat windows snore. Insomnia,
champagne and sleep are overrated.
Yes, loosen the harness: for where work stops, play can begin. And the play may end up by improving the poetry. As Eleanor Wilner writes in her critical essay about the imaginary Eastern European poet Irena Zupanik, an "absolute degree of difference between the writer and the speaker [in a poem] is best for poetry, the distance conferring imaginative freedom, an escape from the over-examined life, the personal confession of the already known, which has claimed so much of the literature of the last half of the twentieth century in America." Parker's jolt can unburden a poet of demanding fashion.
Unsurprisingly, since they are poets, some of the anthology's contributors devote themselves to the poetry part of their assignment, doing less with the intrinsic fiction ingredient; their storytelling is more perfunctory than their stanzas, and less relished. No one, though, weathers the jolt with a more nuanced alacrity than Andrew Hudgins, who decided to mock, but sweetly, the challenge met by a translator whose chosen subject almost disappears into the paradoxes of a personal and national history. Thus, the imaginary translator in Hudgins' contribution comes to seem as much a character as the poet.
Hudgins' imaginary poet is Alan Lutiy (1899-1974), a Nazi who when the war was over switched to another profession, plumbing, and also "awakened as a Jew," only to be convicted of war crimes and banished to a hospital for the criminally insane. The cruelly sharp turns and edges of this story are expertly handled. Still, the tonal mastery of the translator's Nabokovian pedantry, a pedantry required by the quest to locate, translate, and publish Lutiy's poetry, is what gives Hudgins his chance to show us what a marvelous fiction writer he is: ruthlessly efficient, recklessly inventive. The scampering wit of his "translator's" commentary on Lutiy is new to me, and the poem by Hudgins writing as Lutiy seems distinct from the poetic talents of Hudgins as we've come to know them. He's done it: become another, or two. |
