'It Can Also Do Nothing Beautifully'

I remember first reading stray poems by Aaron Poochigian online four or five years ago. They were distinctive, especially in their heightened use of interesting words, slangy and Elizabethan. An odd association: his language sometimes reminded me of Saul Bellow’s Augie March, minus the Whitmanian gassiness. His lines didn’t seem passive, inert on the page or screen, nor was he carping about anything. The poems gave the impression of a learned guy not trying to impress you with his learnedness or faux-humility. I could hear Yeats and Auden. Poochigian seemed like a man at home in the world, with something worthwhile to say about it – substance and style. Even the rare poem with political content didn’t hector or otherwise carry on embarrassingly. 

For my birthday in 2018 I asked for Poochigian’s book-length Mr. Either/Or: A Novel in Verse (Etruscan Press, 2016) and read it twice in a month. Later I ordered Manhattanite (Able Muse Press, 2017) and last year a friend gave me American Divine (University of Evansville Press, 2021). To them I added Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments (Penguin, 2009), his Sappho translation. In a 2019 interview with Mike Juster, Poochigian says of the poems in American Divine:

 

“The project began with my hankering to come up with a polytheistic version of George Herbert’s great list-poem, ‘Prayer,’ which ends:

 

“Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,

The land of spices; something understood.’

 

“Herbert, an Anglican priest, was an expert on prayer. Well, I am not George Herbert, nor was meant to be. Nope, I’m just a human American man, but I still feel a need to pray, that is, to speak, sometimes out loud and sometimes in my head and usually at night, to a disembodied listener.”

 

What’s the last time you heard an American poet talk like that? Read “Centralia, PA,” collected in American Divine. For sixty years a fire has been burning under the defunct town in East Central Pennsylvania, started by someone burning trash in the landfill and igniting a coal deposit. Consider the first stanza:

 

“Up a collapsing asphalt road

there is a quaint coal-mining town

that lost its priest and postal code

because brimstone will not stop burning

from casket-deep to two miles down.

When no amount of higher learning

could suffocate the fires of Hell,

the Feds bought all the locals out

but me. Me. Someone needs to tell

the tale of still evolving wrong.

Call me Gasp the Landlocked Trout,

and ragged is my song.”

 

Poochigian resists the kneejerk urge to harangue, suggesting that he trusts his readers to comprehend the outrageousness and absurdity of the environmental disaster. Neither does he resort to cheap jokes, yet the poem’s humor quotient is high. The slant and progression of Poochigian’s poems are often unexpected. When reading the first lines you can never guess how the final lines will read:

 

“Come close, now, world,

and heed a burr

that is a mess

of phlegm:

 

“may no reprieve,

no trick of time, redeem

the reckless them

who zoned a dump

atop an old coal seam.

And him, the chump

who, by igniting trash,

birthed an inferno, hollowed out the land

and turned our breath to ash—

I curse his hand!”

 

Like Kay Ryan, Poochigian is an inspired rhymer. “Dump”/“chump” is especially endearing. In his interesting refutation of Auden’s statement that “poetry makes nothing happen,” Poochigian says in his interview:

  

“So, yes, poetry can do lots of things; it can also do nothing beautifully. Useful poetry is not better than useless poetry. I only feel the need to say this because there is an assumption, in some academic circles, that poetry that does something—helps with the grieving process, serves as a political act, teaches some social virtue, etc.—is somehow better than poetry that does nothing other than be poetry. People who think that poetry should have some 'real-world' practical effect are, curiously, coming down on the side of the 'trade-school' view of universities, the one that dismisses the liberal arts as useless. Many of my favorite poems are simply beautiful. Take a look at Frost’s 'The Silken Tent,' for example.”

 

[My review of Poochigian’s translation of Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (Liveright, 2021) will be published on April 6 in the Los Angeles Review of Books.]