Tag: Alfred Encarnacion

Holding a selected poems is somewhat like holding a life in one’s hands, at least a writing life. One initially looks at the arrangement of the selections, scans the book as a whole, and then begins reading each section of poems in earnest. In a collection that spans a considerable number of years, one usually assumes that the organization of such a book represents the progression of its author as a writer, often with samplings from the earlier works merely tentative attempts toward achieving a distinction of voice and form.

However, Unreconstructed, Ed Ochester’s Poems Selected and New, suggests that this poet early on discovered a distinctive poetic voice and form. Rather than documenting a progression of stylistic experiments, the book demonstrates a deepening of poetic voice and proves that already in Dancing on the Edges of Knives, his first full-length collection, Ochester had achieved a mastery of colloquial, free verse that allows his poems to function in a modest, unassuming, unselfconscious manner that immediately engages the reader’s attention.

Adam Kirsch, the perceptive poetry critic for the New York Sun, has argued that the greatest opposition in contemporary poetry is between what he terms “the courteous and the discourteous.” He’s quick to point out that his terminology has “nothing to do with politeness or prettiness” (or the lack there of) but, rather, with the poet’s strategy for relating to his audience.

Courteous poets invite their readers into the work by accessibility of linguistic idiom; discourteous poets sabotage–as a valid tenet of their poetics–that very accessibility via fragmentation, disjunction, ellipsis, panache, etc. Both approaches can be utilized readily by the poet, depending upon his predilections and ulterior motives. Two contemporaneous examples of the courteous vs. discourteous poet come to mind: Billy Collins as representative of the former and John Ashbery of the latter.

Ochester seems to have decided at the outset of his career that his poems would best be served by employing a common language that could reassure, rather than baffle, his readership and, in so doing, establish a bond of trust so that the narrative energy of his writing might sustain poetic momentum without being impeded by any sense of resistance on the part of the reader. The utilization of this “courteous” strategy results in moving, beautifully realized poems appearing in both the early and later sections of Unreconstructed, and throughout the collection one feels the poet’s allegiance is to the experience the poem engenders rather than simply the form the poem manifests. This is not to imply that Ochester is anything less than a meticulous craftsman but, rather, that he practices an “artless art” which shrewdly renders form as a genuine extension of the poem’s content. As the title poem suggests, Ochester distrusts form per se and is unwilling to “reconstruct” the poetic imagination to conform to it.

Although his subject matter is wide-ranging, moving from Basho to Roseanne Barr, from the Dow Jones Industrial Index to the Hindu god of good fortune, one consistent preoccupation for this poet is the need to serve as family biographer. His portrayals, whether factual or invented, of relatives is such a vested part of his work that they begin to embody a personal mythology. Ochester’s casual, at times offhanded, style may preempt any formal, academic use of myth, but he creates an informal mythological Americana in which family members–such as his father, his Uncle Arthur, his daughter and his son Ned–make their dramatic appearances throughout this gathering of poems from his sixty-eighth year. One of the most successful of these pieces, “Changing the Name to Ochester,” concerns his grandfather, who abandoned the family decades before, whose life the poet must now restore and redeem through an act of forgiveness. (Interestingly, in “The Origin of Myth,” one of his new poems, Ochester comments–almost self-referentially–that “the soldier who gave Jesus/vinegar on a sponge did so not in mockery /but in pity, to offer a restorative.”)

While Ochester may be considered a courteous poet this in no way limits him to a congenial poetry. On the contrary, the poet explores some disturbing areas of the human condition in poems such as “Killing Rabbits,” “Love Poem with Bomb,” “Pocahontas,” and “The Night of the Living Dead,” where the Jesus of Reborn Christians is compared to a parasitic insect laying “his eggs at the base of their skulls.” In this fallen world–in which even those who claim to have been spiritually born again “would like to tear your arms from your sockets… are waiting until the world is dark enough to tear the flesh from your thighs”–the poet is challenged to find justification for human joy and is compelled to seek out paradigms in both the natural and preternatural realms. In “The Wren and His Children” Ochester’s ruminations result in this observation: “once again I admire the animals,/how they never question their motives / and rarely doubt themselves./How happy he [the wren] is.” Like that bird, unfettered by the self-doubts that plague humankind, the poet would like his song to be “at least three times as big as his body.” In the final poem of the collection, Ochester invokes Ganesha, the Hindu god of good fortune, to protect his loved ones because, as he acknowledges, “I know happiness is fragile, I know/we disappear like the mallow flowers by the roadside.”

reviewed by Alfred Encarnacion, New Jersey

Ed Ochester. Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New. Pittsburg, PA: Autumn House Press, 2007.ISBN 978-1-932870-14-5.