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POET REVIEWED: |
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J.D. McClatchy HAZMAT by Reese Thompson There are times, thumbing though the pages of Hazmat, J.D. McClatchy’s latest collection, that one has the sense of entering a very clean, very beautifully furnished house, where not a knick-knack is out of place, not a doorknob unpolished; every square inch having received approval from feng-shui guru and Ethan Allen interior design consultant alike. Other times, McClatchy gives the reader a sense of sightseeing in a fetish/sex dungeon, which happens to be in the basement of a cathedral. What sets McClatchy apart from almost every other formalist poet writing today is his ability to neatly frame his uniquely un-tidy subject. His technical confidence plays counterpoint to a personal insecurity, lodged deep within the psyche. In McClatchy’s Poetry of the Body, it’s of interest that he should begin with the heart, as in “Fado”:
The insecurity of the hypothetical when addressing the lover, tentatively offering up a heart which the speaker describes as, “A jagged crown of flames”, “growling hound of blood,” creates tension with the poem’s external design, which is at once tender and penitent. In Fado, (a plaintive Portuguese folk song) it is the coarseness of the voice that serves the visceral emotion of the song. McClatchy, in his version, is a soprano in her prime, never once cracking a note. The redemption which only the “you” in the poem is able to bestow, hints at a self-blaming love rather than the typically desperate kind. Here, the control of form is a poor substitute for the lack of control in life. McClatchy is reenacting the drama of contrition; the “I” in the poem is practically addressing God, seeking pardon for the sin of loving another more than Him. The speaker is caught in a pattern of betrayal and shame, transgression and self-flagellation, as when he says:
Even in his renunciation of Catholicism, McClatchy freely exploits its drama and power. McClatchy moves from love to carnality, imbuing both themes with the same fiercely applied pathos. His confessionalism, though steeped in the academic, nowhere resembles Lowell’s rhetorical bourgeois veneer. Instead, McClatchy takes pointers from Sexton’s unflinching brutality, pulling no punches, as in “Orchid”:
In this poem, one senses that McClatchy’s version of confessionalism is rooted more in creating myth out of personal experience rather than tearing pages from his diaries. Here, he illustrates how emotion follows its own plot; the beginning, middle, and end of the drama building towards a climax which is sexual and hell-bent at once. He’s chosen to walk the tight-rope between poetry and self-absorption, between the pathetic and the important, emerging on the other side with the collective framed in the specific. His success is often precariously achieved, though it’s the precarious nature of things that lends the poems its added irreverence. Nowhere is this more evident than in “Feces,” McClatchy’s Proustian drama of childhood, where a “streaming yam” replaces the petite madeleine. “that the body most wants/ an empty tomb,// a place to fill/ with the next day, the nurturing/ nothingness it turns into/ with time.” Nothing escapes McClatchy’s moral scrutiny. “O dull gold coin,/ privately held/ and publicly spent.” For him, the feces are a premonition of death, the key to a long dead childhood, and the argument against the self-important posturing of men. “At nine – young enough to believe/ in stories, old enough/ to stand in dread// of something owed to death….” The poem moves with the loaded serenity of a Beethoven Adagio, until the feces comes to symbolize what we suspect it always has. In “Jihad,” the three-sonnet sequence which gives the collection a grudging timeliness, McClatchy begins:
The lines breathe conviction through the nostrils. The rhythm not only compliments what’s said, but seems to echo it after the literal meaning of the words themselves recede. Prosody of this level is striking. There’s an essay in miniature here; the exposition in the first two lines, and then the verdict and irony of the third and fourth. McClatchy is not afraid of making judgments; he’s been there and tried that and we believe him by virtue of the confidence in which he traces the lines. In the second stanza, McClatchy attempts to replicate the magic of the first with:
This is not the first time McClatchy has pointed his moral laser beam at religious hypocrisy; it’s an old theme for him, and he’s best at it in Ten Commandments. Here though, he adds cowardice to his hit-list of distain, the ludicrous self-important rituals of grown men playing at war and righteousness. In the third of the sonnets, McClatchy begins:
He’s become documentarian, foreign correspondent and philosopher in turn. In the last line of the second stanza, he’s hit upon the communal fear of our time, (and of all times I’m tempted to suggest) that our fate is not ours, and in fact nothing we think we possess belongs to us, including our bodies which we cannot hope to control. In the turn of each sonnet, McClatchy takes on the voice of the mullah: the lulling, hypnotic chain of lies in which religion turns the angry, empty lives of men into weapons. He shows us that the word, Jihad, is a contradiction: Religious and War are mutually exclusive and no civilized person can claim otherwise. In “Tattoo,” McClatchy describes the initiation rite of a Maori chieftain’s eldest son:
Ritualized pain is a purifying agent, a necessary trial that, once completed, brings the young boy closer to an assumed clarity. One wonders when reading McClatchy how his fascination with physical and emotional pain figures into his aesthetic sensibility. “The cutter smiled and took/ A small mallet,/ Laid the chisel along/ The cheekbone, and tapped so a sharpness struck/ The skin like a bygone/ Memory of other pain, other threats.” Throughout the first half of Hazmat, the depictions of bondage, disease, torture, and pain, are physically, emotionally and spiritually dealt with. The second half of the collection is dominated by a series of 20 poems under the broad title, “Motets,” which document a holiday in hell. Here, the poems become more relaxed in form, and consequently more relaxed in tone as well. In “Fever,” McClatchy writes:
However, the body and soul are not mutually exclusive; the pain of love is felt as a physical illness.
For McClatchy, it is flesh that cannot be trusted. The body betrays all good intentions, and by way of death cheats you of the solace which comes with relying on the future to be better. The world is a helpless place not because men begin with bad intentions, but because flesh corrupts the soul at every turn. “The flesh corrupted/ with pleasure and punished with more.”
Later, in the same poem he describes limping to the bathroom to put a hot washcloth to his face:
Throughout “Motets,” McClatchy moves deftly into pure lyric, the understated combustion of image and sound that resides confidently in its own other logic. One senses that the poems here are written not from a desire to write good poems, but a need, a fist clenched around the gut. In “Rain Room,” the speaker describes a wet scenery, (the swanned moat, the drown cypresses), and then declares, “Everything finally ready for it to sink in.” Here he brings to the mind of this reader both Plath and Kahlo. The speaker and the lover begin working on a “pain-by-numbers” canvas of a life together.
The finished product is both less and more than the two had anticipated.
On the whole, Hazmat is classic McClatchy. It deals
with some of the same themes as Ten Commandments, yet
expands and deeps them. His concerns and the method
which he chooses to handle them seem to come from
deeper in the gut this time around. Highly
Recommended. Reese Thompson is a poet, novelist and playwright. His work has appeared in Paris/Atlantic, Third Coast, Yefief, No Exit, The Beloit Poetry Journal and others. He's the winner of Lyric Recovery's first Prize in Prague and a finalist in their international competition. His work has been performed at The Nuyorican Poet's Cafe, The SoHo Art's Festival, and Carnegie Hall. He's co-founder of the theatre company, Vex Productions. He's also one of the original Rogue Scholars. Currently, he divides his time between New York and Spain. |
Copyright © 2002 by Reese Thompson.
Material may not be reprinted without prior written permission.