Where do poems exist, in the voice or on the page? Surely the answer is “both,” though the page might be best likened to a musical score. It greatly guides our understanding of the piece, but the full life of the thing is in the playing. W. H. Auden (following Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) famously thought of a poem as “memorable speech,” something to be uttered. A good poem produces a physical response in the listener, akin to a body swaying to music. Even reading a poem on the page, one hears an inner voice speaking. In this sense, there is no such thing as silent reading, nor is it possible to speed-read a poem.
Of course, poems—like plays—are not verbatim transcriptions; rather, they are artful versions of speech, enlivened by rhetorical figures and ingenious rhythms. By turns colloquial and elevated, they operate in the interplay of talk and song. Robert Frost valued “sentence sounds” and the “sound of sense,” out of which he crafted his signature lyrics and narratives. The same attention to how people talk finds witty and idiosyncratic expression here in Daniel Brown’s latest collection of poems.
Math’s a matter that some make / More of than the norm, begins one poem, entitled “A Math Grad,” about a college roommate who comes to understand his suicide attempt in terms of “a funny class of functions”: One / Whose characteristic graph starts out / With the usual smooth take-off, / Somewhere along the line goes / Into a beauty of a loop— / De-loop for whatever reason, then / Picks its rising right up / Where it left off, and never does / Anything like that again.
The ending comes as a relief, but the strangeness lingers—the anomaly of the friend’s one-off act heightened by the looping syntax. The roommate speaks “sane-seemingly enough,” we are told, and in fact, in his metaphor-making, he sounds like a poet. Brown then lands his extended comparison as precisely as a Hornet landing on the Nimitz.
Other poems in the collection refer directly or indirectly to poetry itself—a bad sign in lesser hands. Poems about poetry can be like iPhone photos of iPhones, self-reflexive in a way only an insider could love. Brown’s strategy for composing poems has a wider resonance in “Judo”: I.E., the kind of verse / That doesn’t try to force / People to their knees / (Seeing as it sees / To people’s being thrown / By forces of their own).
This thumbnail ars poetica understands something essential about what to leave out and what the reader himself brings to the work of art. The comedian of Brown’s “Standup” behaves like a poet manqué: Sensing to the second when / a line that’s primed should come, / He looses it. Brown’s own timing is impeccable, his rhymes (verse/force, thrown/own) and repetitions (seeing/sees) loosed precisely in jaunty trimeters.
If only poets were as gifted in their art as Arnold Palmer was making an impossible golf shot, as in “Arnie”: And what he could see he / Could hit. And what he could hit he / Could move. And what he could move he / Could sink. Anaphora lifts these simple sentences into song, and Brown, who has written extensively on Bach, knows music inside out. It’s striking, then, when “Reversion” rejects a Brahms quintet I’d only known / Forever in favor of some sounding of a voice: the news, an interview, / A ballgame, a call-in // Show.
Brown admits in the collection’s title poem to His having been conveyed repeatedly / By music to the cumulus of heaven. But sometimes, he seems to say, only words will do.
Of a piece with Brown’s appreciation of the fine arts of poetry and music is another, less lofty, brand of aesthetic appreciation: girl watching. Caught off guard by its animal persistence, Brown is sheepishly resigned to his hormonal hardwiring, as in “Men”: Haven’t they the least resistance? / Let a looker amble by / And watch the heads turn helplessly. He suggests that, similarly confronted, Newton, if he had never seen an apple fall, could have learned plenty about invisible forces. In “Farewell” the poet says goodbye to his freewheeling bachelor days gratefully but with a pang:
That life of mine was over.
My next would be with her
And doubtless happier—
Though fondness, truth to tell,
Inflected my farewell
To the solitude that I
Had been companioned by.
Brown’s ability to discover the often-surprising counterfeelings associated with a situation expands our emotional range, clarifying feeling in a way that allows the reader to experience it fully for the first time. Brown, it turns out, will miss his longtime companion, Solitude, and we are disarmed by the aptness of Brown’s realization. Poems that hit home the hardest both unsettle expectations and confirm half-known truths in this way.
The final poem combines Brown’s pet subjects: poetry, music, and the fairer sex. In “Certain Choices,” he lists the graces that have befallen him based on his choices of a companion (his lover), a musical instrument (the cello), and his avocation (writing poems). The benefits are With reference to my lover, / Going it together. / To the instrument I play, / Bowing throatily. / To the making of a poem, / Seeing something home.
This elegiac note of seeing something to its conclusion answers the question posed by the book’s title. Brown, now in his sixties, foresees the diminishment of creative and procreative power in poems such as “Libido” and “Descent,” yet in terms of their mastery and delight, the poems in What More? show no sign of either. They are playfully, affectingly alive. What more could a reader want?
David Yezzi, whose most recent book of poems is Birds of the Air, is writing a biography of Anthony Hecht.
