DiesIraeV1, Main, Corpus, bibRecord, 000365

Frederick Turner. Two Ghost Poems. Cincinnati: WordTech Communications, 2011. 104 pp.

Identifieur interne : 000365 ( Main/Corpus ); précédent : 000364; suivant : 000366

Frederick Turner. Two Ghost Poems. Cincinnati: WordTech Communications, 2011. 104 pp.

Auteurs : April Lindner

Source :

Kronoscope [ 1567-715x ] ; 2012.

RBID : ISTEX:4F1502A3925C416744BCB0E266486505C13E8C95

English descriptors

Teeft :
- Afterlife, Books kronoscope, Contemporary poetry, First half, Fred turner, Ghost poems, Kronoscope, Literary criticism, Speculative fiction, Twentieth century, Undead, Undiscovered, Undiscovered country.

Url:

https://api.istex.fr/document/4F1502A3925C416744BCB0E266486505C13E8C95/fulltext/pdf

DOI: 10.1163/15685241-12341249

Links to Exploration step

ISTEX:4F1502A3925C416744BCB0E266486505C13E8C95

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<article-title>Frederick Turner. <italic>Two Ghost Poems</italic>
. Cincinnati: WordTech Communications, 2011. 104 pp.</article-title>

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<p>Among the growing number of American poets who work in traditional forms—the so-called New Formalists—we find a stubborn strain that privileges intellect, craft, and erudition over the reliance on imagery, delicate wordplay, and exquisite sensibility that characterizes most contemporary poetry. Frederick Turner’s work falls squarely into that counter-cultural camp. A poet of ideas, he has written philosophical treatises, volumes of literary criticism, a science fiction novel, and multiple poetry collections including two sci-fi novels in verse, <italic>The New World</italic>
 and <italic>Genesis</italic>
. Though less hefty than those two epics, Turner’s new poetry collection, <italic>Two Ghost Poems</italic>
, exhibits the outsize ambition we might expect from a poet whose blog is titled “Mark My Words: On Poetry, Life, Culture, and the Cosmos.” <italic>Two Ghost Poems</italic>
 explores all four of those weighty topics, reaching beyond the decorous world of mainstream contemporary poetry into the realms of speculative fiction, philosophy, and literary criticism.</p>

<p>The book’s opening sequence, “The Undiscovered Country: Sonnets of a Wayfarer,” begins quietly, imagistically, luring the unsuspecting reader into what will turn out to be a complicated metaphysics of life after death. After the protagonist, identified as “the Traveler,” loses his life in an accident bearing some resemblance to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers, he wanders planet Earth. At times he seems like a refugee, unwelcome and dispossessed, but at other points, Turner’s vision of the afterlife resembles a fairly posh vacation. In “Déjà Vu,” Turner paints the sensuous beauty of a world still perceptible to our dead protagonist:</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>The Traveler finds lodgings in the hills.</verse-line>

<verse-line>They’re knocking down the chestnuts to make paste;</verse-line>

<verse-line>Boys pluck wild mushrooms by their velvet gills,</verse-line>

<verse-line>That night’s risotto’s musky with their taste. (10)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>Moving through a landscape that later turns out to be Tuscany, the Traveler sees a woman who strikes him as familiar, but whom he can’t quite place:</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>They saw each other yesterday up there,</verse-line>

<verse-line>Climbing the marble mountain that now gleams</verse-line>

<verse-line>In brilliant white-gold in the evening air;</verse-line>

<verse-line>She figured casually in his dreams.</verse-line>

<verse-line>Did he once know her in that other life?</verse-line>

<verse-line>And was she his inheritor? His wife? (10)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>Some of the sequence’s most resonant moments involve the Traveler’s attempts to connect with his widow and to recall the details of their lives together. But there are things the undead can’t do. Though our protagonist can observe those he’s left behind and even interact with his living loved ones, he isn’t recognizable as himself to them. More troublingly, he struggles to remember specifics of the life he left behind, his memories growing ever more vague. The poem “Street Numbers” conveys the sensation of this disconnection as the protagonist searches his old neighborhood for the house he lived in once only to find it gone.</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>He knows the place he’s moved to once was home;</verse-line>

<verse-line>He and that lady lived not far away.</verse-line>

<verse-line>And as one seeks the rhyme that binds the poem,</verse-line>

<verse-line>He seeks the house whose name is yesterday. (32)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>In moments like these, The Traveler’s plight resonates deeply; his inability to remember his past feels much like the late-life memory loss so many of us fear. In this and other ways, the plight of the undead is most resonant in how much it resembles the experience of the living. We learn that the Traveler is estranged from a daughter whose loathsome and deadly politics are a reaction against his own, just as many parents find themselves ideologically at odds with their grown children. His attempts to connect with his former wife lead to a friendship that falls apart just as they find themselves recalling their former intimacy, recalling the uneasy truce that might exist between a divorced couple. Late in the sequence, the Traveler manages to sojourn with his widow and her new husband; he can interact pleasantly enough with the pair, but the woman doesn’t recognize him until “Something familiar in his eyes and lips / Wakes in her face a tremble of alarm” (46). Once recognized, he leaves the woman behind forever, realizing that “Life will allow not many curtain-calls. / Angels and ghost are staff, not principals” (46). The strength of this passage comes not from the novelty of its being about a dead man and a living woman but rather from how eerily familiar the emotions it evokes are.</p>

<p>But evoking an emotional reaction in the reader is a small part of what the book seeks to accomplish. Veering between satire, intellectual exploration and high lyricism, the sequence can hardly help but be tonally uneven. Much of the poem dwells in the place where satire meets speculative fiction, concerning itself with explaining how the world of the undead operates in relation to that of the living.</p>

<p>In Turner’s vision of the afterlife, the living are aware of the undead. Scientists and historians study the undead who, it turns out, can do many unexpected things. They cook meals, conduct their own economic transactions, and employ bankers and brokers to help them transfer money and even buy a closed Sandals resort. Subject to the prejudice of the living, they aren’t above pettiness, as in “The Sacred Spring,” in which the Traveler takes a bus ride to a scenic spot and pauses to drink from the Harp Spring:</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>Just then the passengers come back and one</verse-line>

<verse-line>Calls out that trash like him should not be free</verse-line>

<verse-line>To drink the holy water of the run—</verse-line>

<verse-line>That he is just a lifespent refugee.</verse-line>

<verse-line>The wanderer recalls his own renown.</verse-line>

<verse-line>He steps in quickly, knocks the fellow down. (16)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>Interactions between the living and the undead are tense, governed by “Ghost Laws” which prove insufficient to the growing challenge of living-undead relations. A poem entitled “The Legal Issues” hints at some of what Turner will spell out more fully in the book’s second sequence, namely that the universe he imagines, in which time is nonlinear and all people exist at once, is not unlike the Internet:</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>The Aging Laws have not kept pace with how</verse-line>

<verse-line>Time has become a state of information.</verse-line>

<verse-line>What contract holds a virtual person now?</verse-line>

<verse-line>What are the constants of adjudication? (54)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>But this intriguing idea is only touched on briefly in “The Undiscovered Country,” concerned as the poet is with delineating the full experience of the undead. In “The Hive,” he explains how “The body is a family of cells” (37) that, like salmons, “shredded by their journey, green and red, / Spawn and then die, that they be born anew / In ancient wellheads, nurtured on their dead” (37). This perpetual birth and death of the cells separates the living from the undead. “The loss of this strange alchemy is why / The traveler’s body can no longer die” (37). In Turner’s metaphysics, the undead are virtual people, but they also resemble nothing so much as snowbirds—coming and going, scorned by both natives and those who commit more wholeheartedly to their adoptive climes. Their benefit to society are debated by the living in the poem “Snowbird”:</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>Some say that such as he are parasites,</verse-line>

<verse-line>Some an abomination, the undead.</verse-line>

<verse-line>But they must forfeit certain civil rights</verse-line>

<verse-line>And take on hidden onuses instead.</verse-line>

<verse-line>Economists are calling them the keel</verse-line>

<verse-line>That helps the market keep a stable trim.</verse-line>

<verse-line>Moralists say they help the world to heal</verse-line>

<verse-line>(Although this is of small concern to him). (22)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>This kind of exposition is occasionally leavened by a true lyric moment that engages the emotions as well. “Snowbird” ends with one of the book’s most memorable moments: “But many are uneasy when he’s by, / As if a second moon now lit the sky.” This single, luminescent image feels both moving and deeply true. “The Undiscovered Country” achieves liftoff in moments like these. Though these moments are not the sequence’s main point, they provide a gratifying lyric payoff.</p>

<p>The second half of the book shares some of the first half’s thematic concerns but turns out to be a very different beast. A compact and idiosyncratic tour de force, “The Resurrection of the Dead” abandons all the conventions of contemporary lyric poetry, refusing to traffic in lyric moments at all. A work of literary and cultural criticism couched in a dramatic dialogue, this wildly ambitious poem is primarily spoken by a master of ceremonies who identifies himself as Fred Turner and who speaks directly to the reader in the iambic pentameter historically associated with the dramatic monologue:</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>I am a harvester of buried souls.</verse-line>

<verse-line>Allow me, please, to introduce our team—</verse-line>

<verse-line>The dressing station of the lost, we’re called.</verse-line>

<verse-line>We comb the entropy from the forgotten</verse-line>

<verse-line>And harrow out the coals of precious shame. (71)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>Fred Turner’s team is made up of notable souls from along the continuum of human civilization and beyond; the poem’s cast of characters includes Sappho, Hildegarde of Bingen, and Castellax, a human-studies scholar from another planet. Each speaker communicates in his or her own meter—Sappho, for example, in Sapphics, and Hildegarde in the meter of the <italic>Dies Irae</italic>
—with the reader who, it turns out, has recently joined them in the afterworld. “Did nobody inform you that you’d died?” (73), Fred Turner inquires of the reader, inviting him or her into the universe of the poem, an afterlife in which all points in history happen simultaneously and time is nonlinear. As was foreshadowed in “The Undiscovered Country,” this universe is not unlike the Internet:</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>Perhaps you’re wondering how we can be</verse-line>

<verse-line>Standing with wine upon this pleasant terrace</verse-line>

<verse-line>Set on a granite headland by the sea</verse-line>

<verse-line>(Manhattan island, actually, before</verse-line>

<verse-line>The Younger Dryas icecap stripped it down)</verse-line>

<verse-line>And yet be on the very verge of things,</verse-line>

<verse-line>Where matter falls at millions of degrees</verse-line>

<verse-line>Into that place whence there is no return.</verse-line>

<verse-line>For we are not of matter, but like flame,</verse-line>

<verse-line>A dance of information in the flow,</verse-line>

<verse-line>A stable structure in a turbulence,</verse-line>

<verse-line>A fractal shaping of a space-time field. (73)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>As on the World Wide Web, time is non-linear. Thus all of history—human and otherwise—is available to the poem’s dramatic personae:</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>So Hildegarde’s seen Christ on Calvary</verse-line>

<verse-line>And Castellax the first egg of his race,</verse-line>

<verse-line>And I, Fred Turner, once upon a time,</verse-line>

<verse-line>Heard the rehearsals of <italic>The Winter’s Tale</italic>
. (75)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>But Turner’s influences are not all from high culture. “The Resurrection of the Dead” bears a resemblance to recent films in which an elite team of superheroes is assembled to save the world from annihilation. The poem spends some expository steam on describing the team’s more usual work—coaxing into rebirth those souls who aren’t all that happy about waking from oblivion:</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>That’s why we’re here, to catch the hardest cases,</verse-line>

<verse-line>A work of insight, harsh confession, love,</verse-line>

<verse-line>And—though the physics of it is beyond me—</verse-line>

<verse-line>Quite an impressive feat of engineering. (75)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>As in the book’s first half, the rules of Turner’s speculative universe need to be spelled out: reluctant souls are recreated by quantum processors via DNA or other kinds of physical evidence—“Handwriting, craftwork, photos, gossip, even / The tremor of a potter’s hand upon the clay” (74). And one key player in the poem—Doreen Nyamahemba, a fictional Zambian woman who died of AIDS in 1998—is recreated from the contents of her dog’s neocortex.</p>

<p>As intriguing as this premise is, though, it turns out to be only the groundwork for the poem’s central agenda—nothing less than a treatise on the fate of world culture in the wake of modernism. As the team of intellectual superheroes goes about its work, it notices traces of a different kind of voice, “an intonation in the speech, a shade / That hung upon the twentieth century. / Someone we’d missed . . . ” (76). The villainous voice, a strain of thought identified as “a hatred of the beautiful” and even described as whispering into Hitler’s ear, begins to show up in the late nineteenth century and threads itself through the twentieth century and beyond:</p>

<verse-group>

<verse-line>There was a voice, so Sappho thought, that must</verse-line>

<verse-line>Belong to someone that we did not know.</verse-line>

<verse-line>It’s not that she’s averse to modernism—</verse-line>

<verse-line>Here in this afterlife Sappho has come</verse-line>

<verse-line>To love the arcady of Matisse and Stevens—</verse-line>

<verse-line>But this voice, so she thought, was not like theirs.</verse-line>

<verse-line>It was both modernist and alien</verse-line>

<verse-line>To everything that modernism hoped;</verse-line>

<verse-line>It swallowed its own tail, an ouroboros. (77)</verse-line>

</verse-group>

<p>To identify the piece’s villain in this review would be as unfair as revealing the killer in a murder mystery. Suffice it to say that the real Frederick Turner (the poet, not the narrator) has an aesthetic ax to grind and has created a whole cosmology to facilitate the grinding—an act of hubris as entertaining as it is jaw-dropping. Turner himself is, no doubt, in on the joke, and any resemblance of the unfolding action to a video game is clearly intentional. As Hildegard tells us in the poem’s closing moments, the storyteller/creator of Turner’s universe “sets the meaning of the levels / That will test our eager skill” (99). In his willingness to take intellectual and aesthetic risks, Turner confounds the reader’s expectations again and again, testing the limits of contemporary poetry.</p>

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Frederick Turner. Two Ghost Poems. Cincinnati: WordTech Communications, 2011. 104 pp.

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