184
PARTISAN REVIEW
instances in the book seems to open a more abstract, even allegorical
space in which the archetypes of suffering remain constant.
To speak of mere craft in this context may seem callous, but that ten–
sion is intrinsic to the dilemma of Mura's poetry. If he has a recurring
fault, it is a tendency to prolixity, reflected most clearly in his use of
piled-up adjectives and apposed phrases. Where Espada's syntax is wiry
and spare, Mura's is accretive, restless, yet he doesn't always have the
verbal imagination to justify his bloated sentences. "Grandfather-in-Law"
displays this vice at its worst, perhaps because it's written in long C.
K.
Williams-like lines that seem to elicit a kind of verbal vamping, as in
phrases like "some pressing, raw unpeeled persistence, some libidinous
desire for dominance." But another expansive poem, the wonderful
"Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto and Mr. Moto," takes its cue from
Ginsberg, using rhetorical proliferation to evoke a comic yet menacing
rage on behalf of all obsequious Others:
... we are all good niggers, good gooks and japs, good spies and
rice eaters
saying memsab, sahib, bwana, boss-san, senor, rather, heartthrob
oh
honored and most unceasing, oh devisor and provider of our
own
obsequious, ubiquitous ugliness, which stares at you baboon-like,
banana-like
dwarf-like, tortoise-like, dirt-like, slant-eyed, kink-haired, ashen
and pansied
and brutally unredeemable, we are whirling about you, tartars of
the air
all the urinating, tarantula grasping, ant multiplying, succubused,
hothouse hordes
yes, it us, it us, we knockee, yes, sir, massa, boss-san, we tearee
down your door!
What gives this poem its special ferocity is the way it synthesizes the
historical victims of racism into a single Frankenstein-like figure.
Poems like these raise perennial and perhaps insoluble questions about
the relations between art and historical atrocities - for example, whether
poetry can approach such matters at all without subtly aestheticizing and
so falsifying them. Mura is, I think, entirely aware of these issues and ad–
dresses them more than once, as in the coda to his brilliant fantasia on
Pasolini:
