It is no secret that the much-discussed MFA phenomenon has changed the way poetry is written and read. Contest judges now sniff for a contrived polish in submissions that characterizes workshop productions, challenging themselves to decipher between good poems and those that only echo the sounds of good poems—or, perhaps more accurately, those that approximate the well-taught voice of a particular instructor. While some curmudgeonly critics rely too heavily on these generalizations to legitimize heavy-handed dismissals of the vast majority of younger poets, it is sometimes difficult to avoid discussion of this new paradigm when considering debut collections such as Amanda Lamarche’s
The Clichéist.
The title chosen by Lamarche—herself a graduate of the MFA program at the University of British Columbia—is evocative of the potential neurosis associated with the MFA experience, in which some students grapple with fear that they too are producing precisely the kind of homogenized verse critics of creative writing programs deride. Whether Lamarche intends to renounce or recognize this anxiety with her chosen title is anyone’s guess, but the poems themselves teeter on the balance between believability and absurdity, distinctiveness and conventionality.
While
The Clichéist indulges affectations that are as characteristic of workshop poetry as they are of debut volumes—imagery that is more competent than provocative, details that are more convenient than compelling—there are moments when Lamarche steps outside of the conventionally “poetic” voice with which the book begins and verges on the discovery of a style all her own.
The usual MFA admonishments that emphasize precision and appeals to the senses surface rather obviously in such bland but skillful images as “the hooked scar / of the fish’s mouth” or the metaphor of “the heart” as “the centered thunder / silence, thunder of it.” Conspicuously, other images serve the function of sound without bearing any significance to the poem’s meaning—images such as “the sun / soldering the pins of the building” or an account of the girl in a poem called “Fear of Teeth” who “was the child who’d wrenched them / from their ropes, thinking
time / to get paid.” As in Anne Sexton’s less-inspired moments, the mistaken conceit in poems like “Fear of Teeth” is that any personal experience suffices as poetry so long as it sounds like poetry.
Such dutiful service to the poetic conventions drilled into MFA students’ heads imposes a timidity on Lamarche’s work from which she periodically escapes, occasionally stifling
The Clichéist with the affection for poeticized words and images on which popular poets such as Ted Kooser and Billy Collins have founded unlikely careers. “Silence,” “night,” “wind” and “dreams” all surface continually throughout the book as Lamarche grapples with the torment that any serious poet confronts: It is easier to compose lines that resemble great poetry than it is to write great poetry.
The description on the back cover of
The Clichéist suggests that “The Book of Fears,” the section with which Lamarche’s collection opens, tackles “fears unlikely in the ‘normal’ state of being.” However, crude titles such as “Fear of Buttons” or “Fear of doorknobs” burden the poems with a melodramatic absurdity that they strain to transcend. “There is no reason,” Lamarche writes in “Fear of Buttons,” “Reason is frightening. How you must. Some people / fear balloons, their thin skin and blared teeth. For me / it is buttons.”
Unlike Sexton or Plath, poets who explored similar terrain with some success, the believability factor is often lost on Lamarche’s “Fear” poems, prohibiting readers from participating in foreign experiences with any familiarity or comprehension. The problem is not that few readers are likely to identify with a paralyzing fear of doorknobs—though that may well be an issue. Sexton managed to confront even stranger afflictions in her work, but she related them with a language anchored enough in reason to allow some identity between poem and reader.
Lamarche does occasionally succeed at this. In “Fear of Poplars,” one of the book’s finest poems, the fear itself sustains a series of metaphors that yield gorgeous language from first word to last. “You know that sadness grows a willow,” Lamarche writes, “fear grows a birch . . . But a poplar, there is no / mud in the heart to grow a poplar.” The equally compelling “Fear of Bridges” reveals an aesthetic that is less concerned with echoing sounds characteristic of good poetry than it is with nailing images to the wall with the truth: “the bridge squiggling like a fingered worm,” for instance, or the child who imagines that “if you held your breath for the length / of a bridge it would stay a bridge.” These moments shine with a potential that Lamarche’s subsequent books are likely to develop more fully.
In later portions of
The Clichéist, Lamarche abandons the stilted voice that pervades “The Book of Fears” to explore more imaginative alternatives. The book’s midsection, “A Tree Falls in the Woods,” experiments with dialect, while a structural adventurousness pervades the final chapter in which poems navigate the space of the page with a brazenness that suits the violent, profane and vividly sexual content of the poems rather well.
Perhaps attempts at believable vernacular such as “there’s a shitload to consider before getting started” amount to little more than an empty eagerness to talk dirty in a poem, while phrases such as “sinned against my ass” may border on puerility. One can visit any schoolyard at recess and hear the same vulgar banter; why spend fifteen bucks to read it in someone’s book? Lamarche does little to qualify this mere street language as poetry. Some writers founded reputations on an ability to do so—D.H. Lawrence and Tennessee Williams, to name a few—but there are no Stanley Kowalskis to turn these tones to magic here.
Nonetheless, the daringness of structure and language displayed in the book’s later chapters constitute a more interesting, engaging and memorable voice that may make for a rewarding read if Lamarche develops it further in future work.
Copyright © Gianmarc Manzione
