By Luke Dunne
Atom and Void: Poems, by Aaron Fagan. Princeton University Press, 72 pp., $17.95.
The first poem of Aaron Fagan’s I ever read, a sonnet called “Three Kinds of Everything,” begins:
Brilliant, I think. As with so many of Fagan’s poems, it is the minutiae which make it so: that remarkable opening couplet, so frank and so fast; the choppiness, almost a panting, in the fifth line; those deft sonic displacements (“effulgent” into “engulfing,” “approaches” into “abundances,” etc.) pulsing through each line; but I quote a full octave less to exhibit its parts than to make a point about the poem as a whole, namely, that it is one. It is a totality, a fraying totality or, in Fagan’s words, one “that decomposes as it’s composed,” but a totality all the same. Even as the modulations of scale and specificity disorientate, the particular moment (before dawn) and particular place (in bed) on which those modulations converge provide the poem with a central coherence, one that’s easily detectable by the fact that one can read it aloud once, and glean an approximation of its meaning.
The sonnet is one of the few forms of prescribed length to which poets writing in English frequently turn. Perhaps it’s because its boundaries are fixed that the sonnet is conventionally thought of as a receptacle, a vessel (per Donne: “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms; / As well a well wrought urne becomes”). Fagan may handle this vessel roughly, filling it to the brim, swirling it around, occasionally threatening to break it, but can never quite bring himself to smash the thing on the floor.
“Three Kinds of Everything” appears in A Better Place Is Hard to Find, Fagan’s third collection. Many poems in the book evoke this same sense of reprieve (as, indeed, do many in Garage and Echo Train, the books which preceded it). Kylan Rice fairly summarized A Better Place as:
dwell(ing) in the liminal zone between possibility and fate, between memory and fantasy, showing how the process of trying to figure out what went wrong in a life, going back over our tracks in the mud, muddying them more, writing and overwriting, is actually the process of creating a new terrain for new life
The poem Rice quotes to support this judgment, “A Complete Nobody,” is a kind of abbreviated ars poetica:
If I feel the need to spend your time and my wordcount explaining what came before Atom and Void, Fagan’s latest collection, a selection in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, and the subject of this review, it is because the very impulses which once characterized Fagan’s work—that of the reprieve, the “liminal zone,” ”fastening together”—are absent here. For the better part of two decades, Fagan was a poet of the “and yet,” the middle ground between imminent catastrophe and residual possibility, a terrain vague which many other great, and otherwise quite different, contemporary poets (Ange Mlinko, A.E. Stallings, August Kleinzahler, Jorie Graham) have found it convenient to occupy. In Atom and Void, Fagan has chosen to vacate it.
Fagan’s sonnets repeatedly smash open Donne’s urn. Indeed, far from being fastened together, these are poems which seem to self-destruct. Fagan’s lyric gifts and finely tuned negative capability involute, deforming into sheer negativity. The results are strange, all the stranger for the apparent orderliness lent by the sonnet form (page after page of neat little boxes!). Yet Atom and Void is, to my mind, an unambiguous aesthetic triumph.
The collection’s first poem, “We Who Are About To Die Salute You,” begins:
How does the first line relate to the two that follow it? The metrical equivalence, each of the three lines containing fifteen syllables, only forms a relation if we feel the equivalence as we read it. I’m not sure I do, really, not even when reading the poem straight through, and in any case, I couldn’t read it straight through with any confidence in the meaning of that first line. The repetition of “what” makes it particularly awkward to parse, and even now I’m not sure I’ve quite figured it out—is this ignorance the product of resentment, limited knowledge arising from a knowledge of limits, or is ignorance itself autonomized somehow, independently capable of resenting what’s beyond it? And, while we’re here, does “for starters” suggest that this is the first in a series of claims, or does it mean something like ”at first,” as in, at first my ignorance was that but now it’s something else?
The impenetrability of this first line and (by extension, its relation to the second and third) begs the question—where does the poem really begin? Is the first line really the first line, or a kind of epigraph for the poem, within the poem? It’s a pertinent question in part because so many of the poems in Atom and Void use similar introductory or concluding propositions, one or two or even three disconnected (or seemingly disconnected) end-stopped lines providing a kind of frame for the body of the poem, which is often focused on a more concrete, continuous scene or thought. These propositions are free to move around , and you, the reader, may recombine them as you wish. Which brings us to the end of the poem:
This seems more of a piece with the opening line (the relation of vengeance to resentment, ignorance to appearances), though it doesn’t quite join up. The final image of smoke blown, impossibly, through a wall, carries us into the next poem:
If the smoke from those guttering candles is blowing back into the previous poem, so too, perhaps, does the first line here respond to the first line of the former poem, expressing in new terms the same fruitless yearning for knowledge (“the same story differently”). Across Atom and Void, one poem frequently passes a message, an image, or an idea to the next. Other poems vest a part of themselves, a word or phrase or even whole lines, in another. “Rings of Saturn” lifts two whole lines from the previous poem, “The Cloud of Unknowing” (“The solution to most problems / Is to destroy the illusion of clarity.”)
Atom and Void’s eschewal of section breaks seems to reflect neither a desire to evade macrostructure, nor to suggest the homogeneity of a single book-length poem, or even a connected series. (It isn’t a “sonnet sequence” either). For Fagan, the point of doing away with subdivisions is that it invites the reader to pay closer attention to more subtle relations between poems, several of which I’ve already discussed. But it also serves to make the contrast between them more abrupt and jarring. This is particularly true of the periodic lurches into the erotic and the vulgar, two modes which for Fagan tend to go hand in hand. In earlier collections, the erotic and the vulgar often stand for the “real world,” the world poetic discourse cannot represent, let alone redeem. Here’s “However, Some Tradition They Dispersed,” a poem from Garage:
Self-disgust and self-chastisement feature in this collection too—there’s cuckolding, substance abuse, incontinence, et cetera—and all are made to seem more severe in the absence of any possible intimate connection. “I no longer know what it is to love and be loved,” the poet writes, and we believe him. The reader experiences the erotic here principally as the accumulating toll of experience without reprieve, a running sore. But it is not, I don’t think, the principal wound in Atom and Void.
In the essay “Poetry and Enlightenment,” Allen Grossman defines an enlightenment (of which, for his purpose, The Enlightenment is but one example) as “something that happens, that in fact has often happened—a generic event that registers new knowledge, knowledge that may be progressive— … new knowledge about the grounds of thoughtful life—or may be catastrophic.” In either case, Grossman goes on, “all new knowledge demands ‘new’ song, the language of the poet that is, in the words of Celan, both wounded by reality, Wirklichkeitswund, and in search of reality, Wirklichkeit suchend.”
Whether the wound in question was inflicted at Ypres, Passchendaele, and Verdun, as it was for Eliot, Pound and Rilke, or at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Belzec as it was for Celan and many other poets of his generation, the need for new song despite the wound was the signature demand of European modernism. It’s telling that so many of the greatest late twentieth-century European poets felt the need to restage what Grossman called a “traumatic enlightenment,” the immanent violence of history as a source of moral authority and poetic compulsion—as Joseph Brodsky did with the gulags and Seamus Heaney with the Troubles. If the relative paucity of great British, French, and German poets this century can be attributed to a single cause, it is perhaps the impossibility of thinking beyond this model of poetic achievement.
In Atom and Void, Fagan is working through his own, distinctively American version of this quandary—how to reckon with the calamity of history from the distance hegemony confers. Again and again the poet reminds us, and himself, that his world is unreal, that appearances are not to be trusted. As “Envoi,” the collection’s final poem, enjoins:
The problem is, if anything, compounded by the particular tradition with which Fagan himself identifies: “Harold Bloom wrote about the ‘American Sublime’ — you know, things that go back to transcendentalism with Thoreau and Emerson. There’s a strain of that kind of naturalistic spiritual sublime that is, for me, a throughline in American art. It is a cohesive thing that I respond to. I try to write to that tradition that I perceive.”
It was Emerson who held that the laws of nature and those of the mind mirror one another, and for whom “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim.” Atom and Void responds by asking what happens when the unintelligibility of one compounds the unintelligibility of the other. What happens when the modern precept becomes not “Study nature” but rather “Study history,” which can’t be studied from the privileged vantage of the American (or European) artist who’s coddled rather than wounded by reality? In Atom and Void, Fagan attempts to face facts from within a system that makes those facts unavailable, where appearances must be consciously negated:
Luke Dunne is a poet and critic. His work appears in Paris Review Daily, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, Boston Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Berlin.