Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd., 2017. 112 pages. $16.00.
Maybe one bright corner of the current political situation is that it’s opened up more space for socially engaged poems in contemporary American poetry. Such poetry has a long tradition in this and other countries, but maybe we’re paying more attention to it now, desperate for anything that might explain or simply render the mess we’re in. Amid an outpouring of such work receiving much (and deserved) attention, let’s add one more: Christian Barter’s Bye-Bye Land, winner of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for 2017.
Barter’s third collection is a kind of Wasteland for our time, stitched together from political speech, traffic jams, literature, accounts of torture, postgame interviews, congressional hearings, and lyric turns. Barter locates the book in 2008 in New Jersey while reaching across time and place and register.
The collection’s title is taken from a blog post written in response to the tragic death of a Latina woman who, Barter tells us, “died of a perforated bowel after lying for forty-five minutes on the floor of an emergency room” while her boyfriend called 911 from that same emergency room, trying to get some help. After raving about Hillary Clinton and Amnesty and health care, the speaker concludes a stanza from one of the poems based on the blog post about this incident: “and then this whole glass house of cards / is going Click Click BOOM to Bye-bye Land.”
If this sounds like an apocalyptic crazy town, that’s because it is, and that’s one way to render the late first decade of the twenty-first century in the United States of America. But part of Barter’s strategy is to give us many ways to consider where we are. The book stitches the lyric to the absurd, the beautiful to the damned, the insightful to the tragic. After the title appears, we come upon a moment like this:
And the day has dusted the last far corners clean
and the guardrails, shoulders, signs, and roadside grass-strips
are dusted clean, are pulled out clean
from the fire.
It’s part of a recurring thread throughout the book: amid the cacophony of an endless New Jersey traffic jam with two lovers in the car, trying not to argue, there appears a lovely, strange, lyrical moment.
On the first page of the first section, Barter quotes Susan Sontag, as both warning and self-incriminating joke: “One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.” This book doesn’t explain its methods; it enacts them. A partial list of Barter’s references include Thomas Wyatt, Ronald Reagan, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Boston Celtic Eddie House, Guantanamo detainee Adel Hamad, JFK, Columbus, John Berryman, White Eagle, David Lee Roth, and Amelia Earhart.
Rather than leaving us to wonder or hiding these references in endnotes, Barter includes them as footnotes on each page, as if he’s revealing the stitches of his handiwork (and the times we live in) as he goes. At first, I found these footnotes distracting (an effect likely intended), but I learned to pay attention to them only before or after reading each poem.
Bye-Bye Land is split into five sections, each with a loose center that’s pulled in widely varying directions. The first section, “The Warm Land” quotes White Eagle on seeing his new reservation and then updates these words for the speaker’s arrival in what is presumably New Jersey:
And so we went there to the Warm Land.
We passed by the projects and the Quickie Marts
and we wound through the looping miles of suburbs
where every house and hairdo looked the same,
and I saw how the people of that land were
and I thought they were not able to do much for themselves—
As in our contemporary existence, filled with news alerts and feeds and very few moments when we are unreachable, this collection leaps from voice to voice without explanation—but unlike our present moment, the book, from page to page, section to section, begins to accrue meaning, building a vision of where and who we are.
Apart from the domestic back-and-forth between two lovers going about their day amid an epic (and normal) traffic jam and the dissolution of their relationship, some other recurring threads in Bye-Bye Land include the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners and the political talk about it, a Haitian Walmart employee trampled to death by Black Friday shoppers, scenes from Manhattan and New Jersey and Princeton, fatuous, faux intellectual talk about art, and inane sports talk about things like Plaxico Burress shooting himself by accident.
Barter makes us, his readers, a roving eye over all of it, asking us to look at it more slowly, more lyrically than we do in our everyday lives. Near the end of the book, when, after plying him with psychotropic prescriptions, a doctor tries to talk a man down from contemplating “the end of civilization,” the doctor could be speaking to all of us:
How about all those people in front of the coffee shop,
chatting away, sipping their mochas or what have you.
They look pretty happy, don’t they?
Now, who do you think needs the help here—them or you?
Despite the doctor’s logic, Barter’s poems show us that it’s clearly all of us that need help, with the signs of a falling empire and warming planet happening around us. Still, Bye-Bye Land continually gives us lyric stays against the confusion:
A dusty light in October, a light that was like
a long reaching after, the oceans and icecaps
still intact, the trees still stretching out,
still crowded thick at the suburb’s edge, the clouds
of birds still reaching down to touch their tops.
Though it looks an awful lot like we’re on the way to it, we haven’t yet destroyed ourselves and our world, and there is still so much to see, taste, touch, hear, and feel.
But don’t worry—Barter doesn’t let us off the hook either. Near the end of this lovely, strange, singular book, another poem asks, “And what will be said about them when they are gone?” That “them,” of course is us. And he leaves us a laundry list of answers, and questions, including:
That at least they left us these condominiums,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .That most of what they did was actually legal?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .and if they gassed somebody, they must have had a reason.
That they were good people.
That they were free?
