POET REVIEWED:
Reese Thompson on Ellen Bass

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES
ACCORDING TO ELLEN BASS

Mules of Love, by Ellen Bass
BOA Editions Limited, 2002. $13.95

In the very first sentence of the first poem in Ellen Bass’s Mules of Love, she declares:

In a poem it doesn’t matter
If the house is dirty.

The irony of this sentence comes when one considers that the striking thing about Bass’s work throughout Mules is the obvious care and polish each poem is given. Like a tarnished spoon she polishes until her reflection looks back at her. The meticulously crafted line, the inevitability of the perfect word—at once simple and profound—the careful off-hand gesture of just the right metaphor which opens a world of meaning, neither forced and only slightly self-conscious: these are the nuts and bolts of a Bass poem. As fascinating as it is to follow her mind as it negotiates through line and syntax, it’s the gregarious, often compassionate nature of Bass herself which carries the reader to the end of the book. Like one of her obvious models, Billy Collins, Bass has more charm than neurosis. The surface friendly accessibility of her poetry lends itself best to discussing a sort of mid-life contentment, a domestically and spiritually at-ease life without the normal burdens of unhappy childhoods or unloving spouses.

In God and The G-Spot, Bass writes:

Belief and disbelief
are like a pair of tourists standing on swollen feet
in the Prado – I don’t like it.
I do. – before the Picasso.

Later, the physical epiphany of a first orgasm is likened to a more literal religious ecstasy.

That’s the day she reached inside me
for something I didn’t think I had.
And like pulling a fat shining trout from the river
she pulled the river out of me. That’s
the way I want to know God.

Bass’ ability to capture the ecstatic, the momentary cohesion between mystery and certainty, is indeed one of the more remarkable aspects of her work. She knows instinctively how the question can often illuminate the answer. Her philosophy is at once modest though nonetheless imperative.

Although the first section of Mules is titled, If There Is No God, one never senses in Bass the urgency, the poignant need which others have given the topic. Bass has none of the drama of her predecessors. She is not seeking. She has found—which makes all the difference. One suspects that whether God exists or not makes little difference to Bass. Like the couple in front of the Picasso, it is a matter of opinion. Nothing more or less. That she in able to make light of the question without compromising any of its importance is just one of Bass’ more admirable traits. Her humor is deft, her satire potent. Believing in God is not the reason why she loves herself and celebrates her body. Nor is it an excuse not to revel in the world of the senses. Bass has the ability to make the sensory (and sensual) world utterly spiritual, and convincingly so, until one wants to believe in her message. The problem comes when the reader begins to decipher the repertoire of devices she uses to back up her ideas. Again one thinks of Collins. The defining quality of her poetry is clarity, in both voice and metaphor. Her ability to capture the essence or scent of a thing in the most fantastically original and apt way, pinning it the page with a image that is specific and broad all at once, is awe-inspiring. The problem comes about midway through the book when the reader begins to sense a dependency on the same techniques, the same turns, the same ironies, the same voice. As refined as all these individual elements are (and the confidence in which they cohere in most of her work), at times Bass’ approach cannot disguise a certain limitation, especially when the ambition of content seems beyond the capacity of her prosody. One longs for her to reach beyond her comfort zone to experiment, to fail honestly by applying her talents to a different, less contrived, approach.

When Bass does reach beyond her comfort zone, it is usually in content rather than technique. The results are mixed.

In If There Is No God, for example, Bass writes of a spider:

Who will notice? Who will watch
while the articulate legs wrap the dragonfly
round and round, huge wings whirring?

Later in the same poem:

The polar ice caps are cracking up.
The people of whole continents collapsing—viruses bud
continuously from the graceful, convoluted surfaces of T cells,

The poem doesn’t hold up under Bass’ architecture. The reader fails to find anything to feel compassionate towards in Bass’ broad reportage. She is far more successful invoking compassion in If, where she speaks of the one-night stand from years ago whom she discovers has committed suicide:

When I heard he’d killed himself
of course I saw us, back then,
on the living room rug. I’m suspended
above him, propped on my gorgeous arms.
His eyes are the blue of oceans
with no land in sight.

Later in the same poem:

What would have happened if I’d
gathered those clothes
and held them up for him
as though he were weak from illness—

Would it have changed anything
if I’d led him outside
and we’d walked through the city, gloved hands
in our pockets, and told each other everything—
the light snow falling, light
from the street lamps, the amber of weak tea,
the rose white of the sky?

Like other poets before her, Bass is questioning the justice of destiny, the hypothetical what-if of a single afternoon in one’s life. It would not do justice to concentrate on the philosophical aspects of the poem however, since this is not what really interests her. What comes across in this poem seems to be more practical and important. Bass is interested in the responsibility of the self towards others, the compassion which makes every day just that much more livable.

One of Bass’s favorite devices is to begin a poem with an examination of one topic, and then to flip the coin as it were—the first topic being important only in so far as it introduces one concerning herself. One of the more successful examples can be found in Can’t Get Over Her. Bass begins:

My nephew is distressed that he’s still
in love with the girl who went back to her boyfriend—
the one who’s not good enough for her.

When he ran into her again, she had that same bright laugh,
like the shine on an apple, and the wind rose
reaching up into the limps and fluttering
the leaves in the whole apple tree.

Later, slyly she turns our attention around:

Should we tell him the truth?

That he’ll never get over her. Love
is a rock in the surf off the Pacific. Life
batters it. No matter how small it gets
it will always be there – grain of sand
chafing the heart. I still love

the boy who jockeyed cars, expertly
in the lots on New York Avenue(.)

It’s an odd turn. It’s as though she had wanted to talk about herself all along and the elaborate compassion in which she invests the first part only makes the manipulation more suspect. The empathy we feel for the nephew, his lost love, the exactness of her “bright laugh/ like the shine on an apple” is complete. That we cannot feel the same for the “I” telling us the story is something Bass does not understand. It’s an oddly incestuous turn, producing an almost incestuous emotion—she steals his thunder so as not to clearly come off as sentimentally nostalgic or self-indulgent. She loads the rest of the poems with her expertly applied practical philosophy and the sense of wonderment she is so good at.

A theme of unconcealed sexuality permeates the collection throughout. It would be an oversimplification to call Bass a feminist poet. Indeed, the female element dominates her work, and in poems bearing titles such as Poem to My Sex at Fifty-One, Bass arguably crosses the line into self-indulgence and conceit. However, it is of the opinion of this reviewer that vulgar or not, this poem among others seems to be part of a necessary journey. The body is a political battleground, upon which Bass, ironically, fights the war of shame with love and self-love. We are not allowed in on the journey which has taken her to the impasse and the eventual victory, nor can we be sure that there was ever a psychic battle to begin with. There is, however, a sense of astonished awe and newness she brings to the theme. It’s as though the discovery of sexual love and its pleasures was a kind of proof of what she could never bring herself to believe in before its late discovery. The daily miracles of the flesh, the simple physical proof of God in the fact of being alive is a convincing enough theology for her. The frank, undeniably exhibitionistic quality of a line like: “I love the feel/ of my vulva, the plump outer lips/ that fit together trimly/ as hands in prayer,” where Bass forces the imagine of her vagina upon the reader can seem problematic at first. To be sure, religion is not the same as sex. Though it could be argued that sex can be what religion means. In other words, sex can be metaphorized to the same level of abstraction. It can represent the abstraction just as deftly as the iconographies of religion. What either sex or religion ultimately represents is a personal matter and still up in the air.

Sex in the context of a domestic relationship is a theme which, unfortunately, Bass is determined to reiterate over and over in the second section. It’s an odd feeling, in a collection, to turn the page and feel as though one is reading the same poem again and again. One has the sense that Bass, conscious of her argument, feels compelled to churn yet another poem out to complete the point of view (and the book). It’s occasionally tiresome; one of her poems being titled, “Marriage without Sex,” one is tempted to believe Bass cannot write a poem without sex. One of the best poems in the section she devotes to domestic and sexual love is called Backdoor Karaoke, wherein everything she says in pieces elsewhere comes together magnificently.

At The Backdoor Karaoke a man
I would not recognize again
sang “I Love You For Sentimental Reasons”
to his fiancée.

Later:

As I twirled the ice in my second
Johnnie Walker Black – working up to my own
“Embraceable You” – I thought again how
astonishing that we pick someone out of the
countless people who stream by like schools
of silver anchovies.

Later:

We find what to treasure.

And we give what we can – willingness
to get out of bed to look for the cat,
forgiveness for an old affair, a real attempt
not to always be right.

The poem displays all of Bass’ trademarks: the freshness and maturity, the lucidity, the straightforward gregarious intimacy, without any of the coy mannerisms she occasionally falls back on which can verge on self parody.

Some of the most accomplished and fascinating poems are written to her children. In, For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday, Bass writes:

When they laid you in the crook
of my arms like a bouquet and I looked
into your eyes, dark bits of evening sky,
I thought, of course this is you,
like a person who has never seen the sea
can recognize it instantly.

There’s something in the title reminiscent of Sexton’s own poetry to her daughter. In fact, there’s much of Sexton in Bass, without, of course, the eccentricities which made Sexton so fascinating: the lulling quality which pervades the conversational direct address, the profound yet simple immediacy of “I thought, of course this is you,/ like a person who has never see the sea/ can recognize it instantly.” Bass, for better or worse, is more “work-shopped” than Sexton. 

Later in the same poem, Bass writes:

I was sure that kind of love would be
enough. I thought I was your mother.
How could I have know that over and over
you would crack the sky like lightning,
illuminating all my fears, my weakness, my sins.

Here, finally, we’re given a sense of pathos, a depth of feeling and concern which Sexton’s egotism could only dream of. It’s one of the best poems in the book, and Bass knows it.

It’s the subject of her children that seems to invoke the most intangible and fascinating of Bass’ work in the collection. In another poem about her daughter, titled: After Our Daughter’s Wedding, writes of sitting on a log by the bank of a pond:

“Do you feel like you’ve given her away?” you asked.
But no, it was that she made it
to here, that she didn’t
drown in a well or die
of pneumonia or take the pills.

Later:

It’s animal. The egg
not eaten by a weasel. Turtles
crossing the beach, exposed
in the moonlight. And we
have so few to start with.
And that long gestation—
like carrying your soul out in front of you.

The ecstatic longing of “And we have so few to start with./ And….” The short lines, the line-breaks which give momentum to the quick ecstasy of the emotion, like short sobs of joy, the repeated “And”: none of it is calculated or inorganic. The sincerity is without question.

The contradictions of selfless compassion and a grudging conceit, an evolved personality often seeming overly anxious to flaunt her evolution, an irreverent charisma and a fascination with the mysteries which make life work; Bass is a fascinating poet, humorous and compassionate in turn. But in the end, it’s the burden of love and the ultimate pay-off of love which makes the burdens worth bearing that interests Bass. It is love and the people we love which ultimately defines us, elevates us to the status of civilized human-being. She is a poet with a message and the humanity to carry it off.

The book as a whole is a rather mixed bag. Marred occasionally by self-consciousness and an odd sameness, what Bass has to say is nonetheless wise and important. To be sure, a couple of poems do strike the wrong note or feel tacked on, though there are more than a handful of truly affecting pieces. Some may also find her accessibility dull past the first reading. Other will be charmed by her irreverence and her deft handling of the conversational. The poems which do stand up to repeated reading are well worth the price of the book. What Bass does best, she does better than anyone. Recommended.
 

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