The trouble with reviewing One More World Like This World, poet Carlie Hoffman’s third and most ambitious collection, is that what Sir Christopher Ricks calls ‘reviewery’ is in trouble. Hoffman has numerous accolades including the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, Poets & Writers Amy Award, and National Jewish Book Award, so her work garners the attention it should, but the American literati is strangely apt to describe even established poets’ work in terms of simple themes, cultural politics, and gnomic non-sequiturs that border on Tarot. While this might be tempting in One More World’s case – the book’s central conceit involves the Eurydice myth – it misses what the book actually does. One More World is a sustained experiment in constructing a coherent personal register from grand forms – technical, sacrificial, mythological, memorial – and its accomplishment involves the translation of High Modernism into a lyric mode.
Consider Eurydice. For one of Hoffman’s reviewers, her use of ‘mythology illuminates the timelessness of female oppression.’ This reading reduces Euridice to the allegorical and therefore to the banal, quite the opposite of what Hoffman does. Such an ambitious critical veiling of the text, incidentally, is also part of why people are often convinced that they do not ‘get’ poetry. Most of us do not need poems to illuminate obvious truths, and so if that is all that poems are for, why do we need them at all? Another critic ties One More World’s Eurydice persona to mystifying claims about ‘our embodied state’ and how poems ‘let us transcend that embodiment’ to ‘underlying but essential truths.’ Is ‘embodiment’ bad? Hoffman’s book makes no such claims. What ‘essential truths’ ought to be made available? How, except perhaps in Eurydice’s Hades, would I ‘transcend’ to the ‘underlying?’ I am unsure of what such statements mean other than that Eurydice must mean.
But must she? ‘You must imagine Eurydice / happy,’ Hoffman writes in ‘A Condo for Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ.’ Like a poem, happiness is under no onus to mean something other than itself. To borrow from Archibald MacLeish, it need ‘but be.’ An endnote identifies this line from ‘A Condo’ as an allusion to Camus’s ‘The Myth of Sisyphus,’ in which Camus tells us to imagine poor Sisyphus happy. For both writers, the hinge term is ‘imagine.’ Camus approaches happiness as an aesthetic production through descriptions of how ‘each atom of that stone, each mineral flake […]
in itself forms a world.’ For Hoffman, Eurydice does not ‘mean’ Sisyphus or whatever Camus takes Sisyphus to mean. Instead, Eurydice as Camus’ Sisyphus – an utterly sprung thought experiment – ‘forms a world’ of the particular poem that does not reduce to function. If we are looking for metaphors, the helpful one elides Camus’ aesthetic of world-formation through flakes and atoms with Hoffman’s dense use of allusions.
One More World is rife with references to and poems written ‘after’ – among others – Celan, Buber, Lermontov, Auden, Borges, Heaney, the Old Testament, and Rose Ausländer, who Hoffman has elsewhere translated. Why does this matter? ‘Human beings are difficult,’ the poet, Geoffrey Hill reflects. ‘We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. Ane we are mysteries to ourselves.’ In ‘The Townspeople Contemplate Eurydice,’ Hoffman compares ‘the woman’ – who is and is not Eurydice – to ‘that Russian poet / who wished / to be buried / alive / beneath an oak tree. Unusual / desire, even for a Romantic.’ The triangulation of ‘the woman,’ Eurydice, and ‘that Russian poet’ who happens to be Mikhail Lermontov is less important in terms of thematic ‘timelessness’ or parsing references than it is as aesthetic texture, a means for making a difficult representation of difficult selfhood possible.
Something similar might be said of One More World’s Jewishness. The Los Angeles Review of Books’s pairing of One More World with Marcela Sulak’s The Fault is clearly on account of both authors’ Jewishness, which makes LARB’s simultaneous disengagement from poems like ‘Myth of Icarus as a Girl, Leaving’ – one of the collection’s strongest – quite baffling. ‘I float / in the Dead Sea,’ its speaker reflects, ‘and become pastoral. On Ben Yehuda Street / the siren blares.’ It can be helpful to think of Hoffman’s allusions functioning as pastoral elements. Lyric poems produce representations of poetic speakers and their ‘worlds’ hand-in-hand. ‘Author’s Myth,’ for example, presents Moses ‘Before Carmel and the suicides. After / the sea. God was a fisherman above the world. The Rabbi opened his throat / and the ocean swelled. God gave you feet and you emerged in the Synagogue.’ There is no ’I’ in this poem per se, but rather the preconditions for one, all the allusions and elisions of Genesis, Exodus, and the Book of Kings. The ‘you’ evolves from the ocean in the Rabbi’s throat. Similarly, a poem’s Lyric I is more or less complex – it contains greater or fewer possibilities – relative to what is ‘observable’ in the poem.
‘Shall I set my lands in order?’ Eliot’s speaker asks at the end of ‘The Waste Land.’ There is a great deal of the ‘observable’ in the surrounding lines from ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ to the Fisher King, Dante, Pervigilium Veneris, Gerard de Nerval, Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, and The Upanishads. What is significant is less the sources per se than their role in the production of a speaking position. ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins,’ Eliot’s ‘I’ concludes. Eliot’s Modernism nearly always ends at the threshold between historical intellect and lyrical self-consciousness. Similarly, I have often thought that if fire consumed all of Ezra Pound’s Cantos after Canto III, we would be left with a brilliant long lyric poem, one that produced the impression of an ‘I’ from atoms and flakes of the past.
In one sense, the arc of Hoffman’s book enacts the Eurydice-as-Sisyphus narrative. The three sections, ‘The Garden,’ ‘The Replica,’ and ‘Then Roses,’ contain several discrete instances of restaging the same poem – ‘The Twenty-First Century,’ ‘Author’s Myth,’ ‘Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World’ – as Sisyphean attempts. On a grander scale, the book contrasts The Garden’s loss with literature’s failure to produce a ‘Refurbished Eden’ in ‘The Replica.’ In One More World, places like Kearny, NJ, Brooklyn, or ‘the counter of my grandparents’ / luncheonette in Liberty, New York’ are ‘real.’ Foreclosure is ‘real.’ Gestures toward the ‘timelessness’ and permanence of fictions, replicas, refurbishments, and speech are less certain. In particular, ‘The Replica’ stresses the contrast between the lyrical allusion-pastoralism of the ‘real’ world and the artificial staging of literature as purview of the literati. Hoffman’s Lyric I, for example, is ‘Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College,’ ‘Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College,’ or ‘Driving Through Maspeth, NY, After Teaching an Introduction to Creative Writing Class’ in ‘The Replica.’
In Kearny, NJ – at least in One More World – Borges, Camus, and Eurydice align just because. In ‘The Replica,’ this must become whatever ‘literature’ is supposed to mean and everything becomes gradually unbecoming, like ‘stuffing the soft skins / of teddy bears […] as Hades takes Persephone / deeper inside the replica of girlhood.’ In the book’s final poem, the speaker reflects that ‘The dream was so close to the surface, it banged its head on the floorboards. / I trespass forever in the unflinching past. / The apple’s a for-sale sign swaying in the breeze.’ After some great departure, some exile or accomplishment of a phantasm, can we return to Kearny, New Jersey, where ‘the apple’s a’ and the surprise of ‘a for sale sign’ occur as ‘real’ sprung poetics? Whatever is gained by transcending that embodiment? ‘This winter I want a house,’ the speaker of Hoffman’s first poem in the collection confesses, ‘where women slide from the god’s photographs,’ quite aware of the difference between what she wants and ‘the metaphor of this winter house.’ She is ‘playing music when the god is renounced.’ In One More World, we must imagine Eurydice giving a backward glance, wanting in winter.
More on Carlie Hoffman can be found at carliehoffman.com.
One More World Like This World is available for purchase here.