|
Justin Lievano
By way of introduction, I should explain that I set out to read Star Dust at the behest of a supervising editor and not on my own initiative. "Read and review," he said. I read, dutifully, but am unsure how to review. So what follows will go by the numbers. Frank Bidart is an award-winning poet and scholar. He teaches at Wellesley College, and, same as me, lives in Boston; perhaps we have been in the same bookstore some Sunday morning (or clothing store? Where does he buy his scarves?). Star Dust- published by FSG in 2005-received a fair amount of praise, for example, Langdon Hammer, writing for The New York Times Book Review: "What Bidart proposes, to balance the moral and aesthetic risks that he takes in Star Dust, is the largest possible conception of poetry's powers." It was even a finalist for the National Book Award, or perhaps the thing to say is that Bidart was the finalist. If I remember rightly, my editor explained that the nuts-and-bolts paragraph of a review is allowed to be purely descriptive. So I will try this: Stardust is a collection of free verse poems that engage with different prescribed forms. The sonnets challenge the received definition of "sonnet", lacking the characteristic volta, or leap, and resolution. They mimic sonnets. The final poem, the longest in the collection, takes the form of a dramatic monologue, though it bears some of the qualities of epic. The lineation, enjambment and consonant patterning give it a sound like Beowulf. The poem also makes references to Greco-Roman mythology, which enhances the epic feel. Perhaps it is a pseudo-epic? The largest portion of the poem adopts the persona of Benevenuto Cellini, a Renaissance goldsmith, making this poem art about an artist. (An aside: My editor, in our conversation about the sonnet tradition, likened a volta to the drop after the build-up and break in dubstep music.) I've arrived at the interpretive portion of this review, and here I am struggling. I have impressions of this work, but the lack of a throughline connecting one poem to the next leaves me without a star to navigate by as I try to think of the collection as a whole. I'll have to just give it a go: The poetry of Star Dust seems to return to the theme that the human drive to create provides means to escape the average destiny of man; that making something great changes one's life, incorporating it into history where it will endure. However, Bidart also seems skeptical of history, as in the case of musicians who disappear into "a mountain of/ newspaper clippings" ("For the Twentieth Century"). Bidart seems to assert that what one makes becomes one's destiny, so that making is a recursive action: one is destined to make, one makes destiny, destiny makes one create, and so on. The notion calls the emblem of the ouroboros to mind. There's also a recurrent theme of (self-imposed) alienation running throughout the book, as in the poem "Music like dirt": "as my body turned in the solitary/ bed." How that relates to this idea of creation as a method to reject destiny, I do not yet grasp. This poetry escapes me. Its thicket of references to art and music confound me. I do not feel welcome in it. Perhaps that I feel so lost is an intended effect; but I doubt it. Further: I am terribly frustrated by my inability to penetrate this poetry, because it means I cannot go further in understanding why I do not so much care for it. Indeed, there are some especially lewd moments that compelled me to set the book aside for a pause, they were so aggressively frank. But it must be good poetry. It is published; an accomplished poet composed it; and it has received acclaim. Against all that credibility, what is my inexperienced opinion? This would be the place for a conclusion; I don't have one. A conclusion returns to themes established and explored in preceding paragraphs, and as you will not have missed, the critically pertinent parts of the paragraphs above are uncommenced, stillborn, remain unwritten. _ _ Justin Lievano is an English major at Boston University, where he is an editor for Clarion, and a founding member of the Word & Way discussion society. |
 |
ISSN 2150-6795 |