The Garrett Caples Reader
Garrett Caples
publisher: Black Square Editions, 1999
isbn: 0-96751-440-1
price: $9
Caples is part of a younger generation of writers trying to reinvigorate poetry by combining the angular expressionism of methods such as Surrealism with the sheer enthusiasm, lustiness and fuck-all attitude of youth, retreating from the formalist methods of, say, the Language poets and reviving the fun, sometimes pure "amaze me" value, of this French cadre of aesthetic outlaws.
If this sounds like a self-conscious "project", and hence a betrayal of the "automatic" and pure lyric poetry, don't worry: the performative is much alive in this work, as Caples can be as arrogant and shock rock as you would want any younger poet to be.
The dedication to an alternative world, one in which love and eroticism mix in never inelegant dances with the "things" of a virtual dream-space -- "A can opener found in Brooklyn meets the tailfins of Alabama," he writes in Resonant Cylinder [73] -- is stated quite frankly in the second poet of the collection, the "First National Anthem," which begins:
an homage to places I've never been:
to the skies I haven't seen unroll red saddle blankets
and tuck in for the evening
and the birches whose teeth I've never brushed
and the buildings whose looms have never woven shadows into nets
[4]
Caples' love poems, of which there are many, step out into the open from what might be a psychedlic core, straddling the line between Syd Barrett stream-of-sweet-nothings and bachelor-machine eroticism of Duchamp:
Mr. Baritone-Man, tell my love of me, and do it in a way she'll be impressed. Paint me on her eyes in your dark, rich tones, and ignore the fact she's not too crazy about the saxaphone. There's a tendency to take these things personally, believe me I know, but you're my last resort, your deep craters of sound, the prod of your twisted horn. Gouge her with your bull-like strength, as you chop your meaty way through innuendo and crescendo like red Hungarian wine. Show her brochures made from glossy squalls, depicting the castle we'll occupy on the banks of the Tigris [...]
[38]
A salient quality of this work is the turn toward an anthropomorphic center, or in other terms a "pop star" cult-de-moi, for the lyrical subject; i.e. though there are "process" poems (the words of one of which is entirely alphabetical: "A basic concern demands extreme finesse, generating hollow increments, jealously knocking low minds..." [81]), most of them are clearly celebrations of will and vigor in a somewhat demoralized, but not entirely hostile America.
This is accentuated by the cover image, which is a full head-shot of the author though heavily tinted by an orange electric fog, the combination of the image and the title of the book suggesting that this is a posthumous work, hence elevating the living poet to dead-poet cult status a little before his time.
That Caples is conscious of his stance toward the impersonality of contemporary poetics comes through most clearly in "Humped by Barrett Watten," a quasi-essay that accuses the Language poets of being "Victorian" in their attitudes toward sex (hence the over-the-top vulgarity of the title).
Like in another poem considering Rene Char's awe at a pair of lace panties (for which Char receives no drubbing for, after all, he's honestly enraptured) in which Caples discourses with an imaginary W. S. Merwin ("No!, it is his hushed awe in the face of women's mystery!"), he deftly, if pretty obviously -- the sarcasm makes a barnside-wide target of his object -- employs a dialogic technique for presenting counter-arguments regarding Watten's work:
Don't you get it? Watten's text was an ironic, postmodern take on the erotic, which was not constrained by the illusionary and arbitrary requirement that it be erotic. And the erotic is an ideologic construction anyway, imposed on us by an oppressive society.
[76]
Caples says "Maybe so," but provides throughout this "reader" -- by turns brilliant and/or over-clever -- what he clearly regards as an alternative to this irony which is itself oppressive: a song of the self that revels in the possibilities of dreams, of thought, of literature (homages abound) and, indeed, of language itself.
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