Using words as swordplay

GEN-X poetry has a reputation for being lightweight. Clever and ironic, more like Polonius than Hamlet. And when it does sound like Hamlet, it’s Hamlet as a whiner. Many young poets are figuring out how to deal with being members of the global society without being overwhelmed -- irony and cleverness are ways to avoid drowning.

Ted Mathys doesn’t mind drowning: Given the choice between suffering and irony, he heads for the pain, in an S&M; kind of way: “though I’m certain you won’t show up / four lengths of rope in case you do.” His poems scramble away from us. Sentences twist without a preconceived sense of where they will end, yielding eerie phrases like “... i before e / except ceiling fans everywhere and terrifying” and “all the uncles uncomfortable in their skein of being / creatures of the so and so and with songs ....” Though his turns could be sharper, he’s a bit like the mid-century poets of the New York School of poetry (which counts John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara among its members), only with the whimsy replaced by a menacing sense of claustrophobia.

Mathys’ voice in “Forge” is that of a writer who admits he’s not in control of his world, yet he’s still a virile poet, a poet of sperm, as feminists say: “All spicule and yoke sac, lucent in the surf. I dunk my fingers in the spume.... “ He’s male-oriented without the silliness of, let’s say, Robert Bly on a bad day, and he’s among the first of the poets of the new millennium to deal with war.

The twists he uses allow him to tie together threads usually kept separate. In the section titled “A Little Religion of Sledgehammers and Mandarins,” he writes, “Hand watches man move straight-legged to the bedroom, pull a black mandarin from beneath the duvet. Beating.” The final word evokes both the beating of a heart, and a coarse, sexual connotation. A darker, more American knot comes later, “I have met the overlooked thieves of Golgotha and they spoke of sand. So here I am, bivouacked in it. A beach runt. Others have called out to you from the trenches of their own unfortunate beaches.... “ Think of all the things sand and beaches mean: Spring break, D-day, “Charlie don’t surf,” the sands of the Holy Land.

Entwined in this whiplashed, snake’s-grave wordplay, Mathys drops many moments of meaning. In sentiment, though not in style, he sometimes resembles World War I poet Rupert Brooke, who also wrote about tension between the soldier as person and as member of the collective. “It would be too beautiful to feel / all of our blood at once,” Forge writes in “The Hole in the Fog.” And toward the end of the poem “The Soldier Considers Ranks”:

... the soldier shudders and considers

the ranks | the ranks

are a facet of the soldier and the soldier

a facet of the ranks but do the ranks return

the soldier’s regard

Sometimes Mathys throws himself in too many directions at once, but he is truly daring. In first books, poets often keep using the good manners they needed to succeed in their masters programs, but Mathys has no such manners -- none at all except, perhaps, a sense of honor. So you find that he can go from high culture to low in one stomach-churning swoop: “[S]ee Hector’s battle gear shine like a magnesium fire, see him bludgeon a Greek then lick his scarlet finger like a Blow Pop.”

“Forge” looks at life with a taunting gaze that doesn’t waver, even when it stares at death, and death, faced truthfully, hurts like hell. (To really see someone die, even on paper, causes you to die for a moment too.) This debut is wonderfully, disturbingly, upsettingly real. Reading Mathys, one remembers that poetry isn’t a dalliance, but a way of sorting through life-or-death situations -- ones you might not win.

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Laurel Maury is an occasional contributor to Book Review and an editorial assistant for the New Yorker.