Brooklyn, NY: The Song Cave, 2020. 90 pages. $17.95.
When I first encountered Charles North’s fascinating poem “Everything: Coda” (Poetry, Dec. 2016), I was amused by the idea that after everything had been said there might be still more to say—a coda. It seemed vaguely post-apocalyptic, not to say postmodern. But then the poem that appeared under this title seemed to be more concerned with “pre-“ than with “post-” conditions—“Architraves pre-everything”—or to combine the two conditions in a whiplashing collision of perspectives: “Yesterday, for example, / with its unexpected view of posterity.” Like the proverbial tail wags the dog, this “Coda” “waves everyone and everything away,” leaving nothing to which it can stand as a coda.
The recent reappearance of “Coda” as the final poem in North’s collection Everything and Other Poems restores a degree of stability to the meaning of the title, though dynamic instability characterizes the volume as a whole. It turns out that “Everything” is itself the title of a long, twenty-six-page poem, to which “Coda” stands as coda. Together with “Study for ‘Everything,’” which is placed at the head of the sequence, the three poems compose over a third of the collection. They are the result of North’s undertaking: a deliberate experiment in writing a long poem, as he has explained in interviews. As such, the poems offer an occasion for reflection on the possibilities of the long poem in a tradition that must claim North, based on a career now extending to fifty years, as one of its masters.
Call it the New York tradition rather than the New York “School.” The poets in the tradition have always objected to the term “School” because it implies indoctrination in a set of rules, and the New York poets reject all rules in the name of creative freedom. “You just go on your nerve,” asserted Frank O’Hara, who proved how long he could “go on” in Second Avenue (1953). North clearly has O’Hara and Kenneth Koch in mind (one of the poems in Everything, “Desk,” is dedicated to Koch). But as predecessors, they serve as starting points rather than prescriptions to be filled. The real challenge of the long poem in the New York tradition is that you have to “go on” without knowing where you are going. This distinguishes the long poem from the traditional epic, which has a predefined goal: the outcome of the battle (Iliad), the end of the journey (Odyssey).
However, “Everything,” by its very title, implicitly accepts at least one epic convention: encyclopedic scope, including everything there is to be said about human experience. North’s poem ironically undercuts this ambition from the very beginning, with an epigraph from George Herriman’s comics series Krazy Kat: “Everything is just nothing repeating itself.” Nevertheless, this deflating epigraph does not rule out the possibility of additional epic resonances (there are no rules!) as much as it prepares the reader to expect that they will be tinged with similar irony. For instance, where Odysseus journeys to the underworld, North “almost went down” on a sidewalk covered with ice, identified as “the film / over the underworld.”
The point is not that North set out to structure his poem with epic parallels, as if he were updating Joyce’s Ulysses. Rather, in the course of writing a poem long enough to include “everything,” he seems to have discovered that epic conventions naturally intrude along with everything else. The reader does not need to recognize them as conventions in order to experience them in action in their new context, like the action of “going down” whose context is, after all, no longer a sidewalk but a poem. If that action distantly recalls the journey to the underworld in the Odyssey, a similarly distant recollection occurs in the case of the battle motif that is central to the Iliad.
North makes almost no overt reference to the continuous warfare that has become a mark of our time. In this regard, his poem falls short of including everything. “Coda” quickly drops the phrase “collateral damage” but leaves it to the reader to make any connections to current events. In an abstract sense, “Everything” revolves around a battle between the two principles of “everything” and “nothing” introduced in the epigraph and repeated as explicit terms throughout the poem. Again, we feel the action even if we don’t see it as a battle: “Everything gusts— / and then dies back down.” But North has made sure that we do see it as a battle by selecting The Fight Between Carnival and Lent by Pieter Bruegel as the cover image for his book, to whom North refers twice, by name,in “Everything.” In the poem’s battle, “everything” is Carnival and “nothing” is Lent. Appropriately, the detail reproduced on the book’s cover shows only the Carnival side of Bruegel’s painting. “Nothing,” North suggests, is like the film of ice over the underworld, “which can’t be seen or heard or felt, / although its presence is a part of everyone’s ordinary experience.”
North’s approach to “ordinary experience”—which can be felt, even if the “nothing” that grounds it cannot be—separates “Everything” from the epic tradition and aligns it with the New York tradition of the long poem. But epic does not simply foreground dramatic action apart from the ordinary. After all, a fall on the ice can symbolize a descent to the underworld. The real difference lies in the fact that epic employs language to describe experience while, in “Everything,” language is the experience. It is the medium in which we live continually, every day, and it generates events, rather than merely recording them. Whether or not “the film / over the underworld” precipitates a descent, the juxtaposition of “over” and “under” in that phrase performs a verbal somersault.
When the poet embarks on a long poem without knowing where he is going, language is his only guide. It may lead to more than one destination, or it may open paths that prove to be blind alleys. At one point in “Everything,” after the word “cork” has appeared more than once, North observes, “cork again but not a real theme, I’m pretty sure.” He can only be “pretty sure,” because he is not in charge, as an author (or the muse of epic) was traditionally assumed to be. He is a speaker of words—the conversational gesture “speaking of” frequently marks transitions in “Everything”—and what he says is determined by the language he speaks. “Can I say that?” is a central question linking “Everything” to other poems in North’s book, including “Names in November” and “Variations,” which both draw the line: “you can’t say that.”
To conceive of ordinary experience as linguistic experience can lead to arid intellectualism, the flaw sometimes attributed to Language poetry. There is nothing arid about North’s poetry. Although he asserts that “Everything exists / inside a giant thought balloon,” the image itself represents the humorous tone he often employs to lighten the thought. There is “air outside the balloon,” a kind of nothing, that keeps it afloat. There is also a line of feeling, which may be invisible, but nevertheless keeps the balloon from simply flying away.