A voice worthy of a larger stage

ONE of the most political poems in “Lightning at Dinner,” the sixth and latest collection from Minnesota poet Jim Moore, is also one of the most precious.

A short poem, it is called “Against Empire”:

Small olives taste best.

Small stars shine farthest.

Small birds call

most sweetly. Small lives,

we are small, small lives.

Small olives are good, but do small stars really shine farthest? No. They shine the longest, but that bears no direct relation to brightness. Moore is taking a willful stand, ignoring the facts as if to demonstrate his political desperation, as if to recommend ignorance itself. He is a regional poet, having lived mostly in Minnesota since the publication of his first collection, in 1975, and his poems are a fine contribution to American poetry, which is an aggregate of regional literatures. But, as is true of many who prize modesty, his work seems sometimes to have cheated itself.

Dana Gioia, before he became chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, wrote an essay on “The Anonymity of the Regional Poet,” which argued that the American poets with the most popular appeal are often the least known, because their plain-spoken styles do not interest the academy or the critics. The subject of his essay was Ted Kooser, then a relatively unknown Nebraskan, now U.S. poet laureate, appointed during Gioia’s tenure at the NEA. Moore is of a different political stripe, and is more traveled than Kooser, writing often of his summers in Spoleto, Italy, but he is everywhere local, and what Gioia wrote about Kooser is true of Moore’s work: “His style is accomplished but extremely simple -- his diction drawn from common speech, his syntax conversational.”

Gioia noted of Kooser, “Reviewers find him eminently unnewsworthy,” and here too the same might be said of Moore, were plain-spokenness not becoming a major trend in American poetry. Robert Pinsky, who was appointed poet laureate in 1997, started the Favorite Poem Project, which publishes anthologies of Americans’ favorite poems, along with their commentaries. Billy Collins, appointed laureate in 2001, has become a phenomenon, outselling more ambitious poets with his poems of easy observation. Kooser continues the promotion of plain-spoken, grass-roots poetry with “American Life in Poetry,” a weekly column appearing in some 70 newspapers that highlights the work of “Illinois poet Lisel Mueller,” “Texas poet Janet McCann,” “Ohio poet Kevin Griffith” and the like -- almost all of them obscure poets, presented not as extraordinary voices but as everyday citizens. Perversely, populist regionalism has become a top-down trend.

It is worthwhile, then, to consider Moore, who has developed on his own. In his first book, “The New Body,” he tried to be local and global at the same time. Its first poem refers to the “Minnesota thatness” of nature but compares the “hunger” of local flora to the political hunger of poets Miguel Hernandez, under Franco, and Osip Mandelstam, under Stalin. The regionalist impulse in this first collection functions as an anchor to keep the young dreamer down to earth. In the title poem, the moment of rebirth is encapsulated in an intimate anecdote: “Something snapped, / Like the deer we startled last year at Canby.”

Eventually, Moore had to choose between his observations of the local and at least one kind of worldliness. Thirteen years after “The New Body,” he published “The Freedom of History,” which includes the perfectly plotted long poem “For You,” a description of the poet’s deliberations about joining the war in Vietnam: “And we had so wanted to go on drifting, / floating on the moment’s shifting current / as we learned to give the poems we tried to write / a chance to rise, waveringly,” he writes, saying goodbye to an aleatory poetic process. Forced to make a decision, the poet goes for a walk, and in his observations of local permanence, he decides to stay.

I couldn’t get enough

of the men with their bent heads in the bar,

the sled, the swing.

This decision cost Moore 10 months in federal prison for resisting the draft, and even in his new collection Moore’s emotional life is measured in costs and outcomes. Here, his appreciation of the sled recalls William Carlos Williams’ famous short poem: “so much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain / water // beside the white / chickens.” Williams is the patron saint of locally oriented writing. “This primitive and actual America must sober us,” he wrote, advocating an America even more “actual” than the iconic regionalism of Carl Sandburg or Robert Frost. Williams believed in “the objective intimacy of our hand to mouth, eye to brain existence.”

Moore retains some of the urgency of description that Williams had, but his descriptions, however “eye to brain,” always detour, for a little more analysis.

I remember my mother toward the end,

folding the tablecloth after dinner

so carefully,

as if it were the flag

of a country that no longer existed,

but once had ruled the world.

The mother realizes that her domestic reign is at an end and she withdraws with self-respect. Throughout “Lightning at Dinner,” the analysis is often about completing a life transaction. This closedness is part of Moore’s love of smallness. Fathers die, “each in their own time.” He asks the skeletal trick-or-treater, “[W]hat can we give you from our still warm hands?” He tells his mother that he has put her in a good nursing home: “And it’s true, / once consigned to hell, / it matters intensely which circle.” Contentment is something “accomplished.” Dying is “what this god has for a tool.” He bargains: “if the season is bare of leaves, the death painful / and greed for the world still fiercely with us, / then let someone else be allowed our place on the white couch.” He writes of “a secret life inside us / that knows the cost, / that is willing to pay the price.”

Moore, who chose the plain and local at the price of prison, has amassed an enjoyable body of work that acknowledges the opportunity and cost of regionalism. But even his most perfect poems reveal the limitations of smallness, of tying poems tightly in plain-spoken meaning. As in the short poem “Brief Lives (2): Warning”:

6 A.M., the hour of the serious fishermen

who stand quietly in orange slickers

as they sway slightly in the small boats

far out to sea. Those ancient warnings,

the pelicans, patrol the world closer at hand.

It is the hour when the nurse tries to wake my mother,

then lets her fall back again

into the sea. Some fish are not worth

the keeping. Asleep again, asleep again,

her heart rejoices. And the great escape continues,

alone, in darkness, far under the surface.

The image of his mother is tucked too neatly into the metaphor of the caught fish, creating a false, if definitive, analogy between the underwater fish and unconscious woman -- one is freed from the hook, but the other is freed from life. The drawback of overtly modest poetry, such as that advocated by Kooser, is that it must be of definite use, providing a payoff, a certain illumination of localized experience. There is something cynical in insisting on resolution; it’s like demanding a receipt of a poem. Williams was more open-ended: He was not so bizarrely practical; he let his wheelbarrow rust in the rainwater. In imitation of his up-close immediacy, today’s popular poets have circumscribed their horizons, becoming smaller than we need our poets to be. *