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Review by Rachel Galvin
“Paul Violi, volunteer, was on hand to enjoy / The day and encourage the less experienced paddlers / / Watch where the hell you’re going! / For the love of god, are you blind?” So begins “Pastorale,” a poem that appears in Paul Violi’s new collection Overnight. The self-mocking gesture of authorial inscription is a hallmark of “paulvioli poems,” as the author dubs them in Fracas (Hanging Loose Press, 1999). Charles North makes a similar commentary on poetic composition in his collection Cadenza: “Yet you NORTH standing on your head / and playing the Selmer alto, the fragment of a sail” (“My Ship Has Sails”).
North and Violi are both “experienced paddlers,” to be sure. They write with a keen consciousness of their own prolific production and the poetic spheres in which they wish to situate themselves. The two new collections converse, by turns, with poetic predecessors such as Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, Lewis Carroll and Hafiz; their contemporaries (North sets a line from Violi as an epigraph); and the poets’ own previous collections.
The latter manifests most interestingly in a kind of self-translation in North, who rewrites three of his own poems in a series of “Translations.” The earlier poems, first published as “New Poems” in North’s New and Selected Poems, 1999, are printed in an appendix to Cadenza. Here they appear in a smaller font, as if they were footnotes to an academic text. The inclusion of the originals is a tempting invitation to comparison. Working backwards from the appendix to the body of the text, the reader finds the opening of the original “Building Sixteens [I]”:
The building is doughnut-colored light
and the colored light behind,
carved shadows included,
is littered with donuts.
Good spelling doesn’t
get you very far
in life; . . .
These lines are recast in the second poem in the series of “translations.”
The windowed construction is the rusted color of a cruller
and the insubstantial hues on the other side,
not excluding hard-edged shade,
have kruller written all over them.
Knowing the correct order
letters appear in a word
won’t make you a C.E.O.; . . .
Each version invokes the grammatical hilarities brought about by advertising ploys—a concern common to both poets. North’s mode of self-translation ratchets up the lexicon from the Anglo-Saxon simplicity of “building” to the polysyllabic noun phrase “windowed construction,” and from the local “doughnut” to the imported “kruller.” The engine of poetic production is fed with recycled fuels. Reinvention? Performative commentary on the writing process? Self-cannibalism? As Violi writes in Overnight, “And as for poetry, it’s easy / And impossible—like stealing from yourself” (“Thief Tempted by the Grandeur of February”).
Both collections are structured by a concern with modes of speaking and writing. They combine an abundance of erudite allusions with pop culture references and colloquialisms—from stage directions or transcription indications such as “[Medium Close Up]” in Violi and “[laughs]” in North, to faux Latin proverbs (“Omni Animalium Post Coitum Marlboro”) and parodies of the acknowledgments page in Violi, and, of course, footnotes—in “Extended Shortages,” Violi gives “the weight of heaven and earth” and “Philetus” marginal explication. He and North share a preoccupation with reading and misreading—calembours and linguistic misunderstandings often produce humor in their poems, such as the bilingual puns “pizza”/“piazza” and “Boul’Mich”/ “Bowl Mitch” in North, or Violi’s “Islip, Long Island, New York. / That’s right, that’s the name / Of the place: I slip. I swear.”
Although they are direct contemporaries of Susan Howe, Lynn Hejinian, Michael Palmer, C.D. Wright, and Charles Bernstein, the poems of Violi and North are closer to the discursive rhythms of Frank O’Hara or James Schuyler than to Howe or Hejinian’s lexical constellations. And in contrast to the pointed humor of C.D. Wright’s lean, idiomatic lines, the poems of Violi and North spin out a loose, gamboling, nonchalant playfulness.
However, this is not to say that either is indifferent to the compression and distillation offered by traditional forms. Both Violi and North explore the mechanics of writing, reinventing the sonnet and sestina, and whittling out their own forms, such as North’s “Summer of Living Dangerously,” a diary-that-is-not-a-diary (the August 5th entry does, in fact, echo Magritte and announce “Ceci n’est pas un diary”) and Violi’s series of riddles, “I.D.: Or, Mistaken Identities,” which comes complete with an upside-down answer key. These formal and lexical ludics point to fractures in linguistic communication, but not in a fatalistic way—in both poets this is, rather, a playfulness intended to generate comedy. In “Appeal to the Grammarians,” Violi writes:
We, the naturally hopeful,
Need a simple sign
For the myriad ways we’re capsized.
We who love precise language
Need a finer way to convey
Disappointment and perplexity.
For speechlessness and all its inflections,
For up-ended expectations,
For every time we’re ambushed
By trivial or stupefying irony,
For pure incredulity, we need
The inverted exclamation point.
For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,
For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift
Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,
Or felt love or pond ice
Give way underfoot, we deserve it.…
I’ll stop citing the poem here, so as not to give away the punch line—but I do want to mention that it concludes with the poet drinking an espresso in Caffè Reggio, right off Washington Square in Manhattan. The poems of Violi and North are rooted in New York City, with plentiful toponymic and situational references. They are both city poets aware of the New York school legacy.
Violi’s deep-seated sense of place fuels his response to 9/11. In a poem dated two days later, the poet’s penchant for linguistic play comes together with his passion for recording the lived experience of being a New Yorker.
September 13, 2001
“When you leave New York, you’re not going anywhere,”
Del tells a bunch of customers leaving the Grange.
Leaving New York…? What a strange notion.
I’m out the door, too, uptown to teach another class.
Cabbies so annoyingly polite they throw me off my stride.
They’re stopping at stop signs for Christ’s sake.
On Commerce Street a building, narrow, tower-like—I
Never noticed it before—a great flaming rooftop grove
Of birches soaring in the wind. Phoenix…Phoenicity…
Is there such a word? Felix…Felicity—Anyway,
Something for this city to set its watch by.
Uptown early enough for another coffee, I stop
At the West End, keep a weak joke about Oswald Spengler
To myself, and ask Jay to translate what he’s chalked up
On the slate board behind the bar. Veni, Vidi, Velcro:
“I came, I saw, I stuck around.”
The poem’s crux is located between the allusions to the Twin Towers and their destruction and rebirth, and it is knit together from overheard phrases, invented words, and Macaronic Latin. Even when writing of an experience of shared trauma, Violi maintains his characteristic understatement and tongue-in-cheek humor as he renews his pledge of devotion to the city—as the poem’s close suggests, I’ll stick around.
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