TRAMPOLINE AND BALANCE BEAM: ON ELTON GLASER’S GHOST VARIATIONS AND STEVEN CRAMER’S DEPARTURES FROM RILKE
Elton Glaser and Steven Cramer bookend my life in poetry. I began reading Elton’s work––and he mine––when we were MFA students at U.C. Irvine fifty-plus years ago. Steven and I, along with Teresa Cader, have shared work for almost two decades, first in person at Starbuck’s, then in each others’ homes, now on Zoom. I’ve been thinking about Elton’s and Steven’s electrifying new books––Glaser’s eighth and Cramer’s seventh––both published this fall. They’re very different in subject and approach. But along with a shared reverence for Wallace Stevens, each poet delivers the frisson that marks a vibrant, vital collection.
Full disclosure: I blurbed Glaser’s book with a reference to his art “making a taut trampoline of language.” The first lines of “Cheap Weekend in Another Country” are an example of what I mean: “One-star hotel: dangle of a bare bulb/Like a spider from Chernobyl.” Meaning jumps out of language from the first words. “One-star” is from a travel guide, but one star also throws little light. What offers light, in fact, has become darkness visible: an enormous mutant that’s moving, yes, toward you. The town’s cathedral is “where God still feels uneasy among/Saints with their hearts ripped out, saints raped,/Or pulled apart, or decommissioned by a pope.” Instead of peace, this church offers violence and erasure, the last managed by the cool language of bureaucracy. Eternal God is overruled by temporal functionaries, even as light becomes a baleful, radioactive menace. And Glaser’s tone? His wry wit makes horror even more shocking. The reader’s mind bounces from initial perception to another, sometimes contrary, understanding, and then to another as “Chernobyl” registers fully as a place with an ongoing history as well as agent of the spider’s transformation.
Glaser’s language enacts anguish; Ghost Variations immerses readers in the enduring grief caused by the sudden death of his wife Helen ten years ago. Yet despite the urge to paint it black, Glaser won’t ignore the lusciousness of life that rudely muscles through. In “Dahlias in Akron,” the plants Glaser “bab[ies] up from dirt” unfold “Into ball and cactus, spider and pinwheel and posh medallion,/Bold infants of the silt and sunlit rain.” “Flaws and August at the Lake” makes a miracle of “…geese landing, water a silver blue/Below the blue silver of the sky,” birds that “…seemed, a moment before they settled,/To walk on air and walk on water,/Wings raised and the feet finding themselves//At home wherever they were, wet or dry.” Sonorous as prayer, the lines sound unworldly beauty in a natural world that offers distraction from, if not a complete antidote to, suffering.
Ghost Variations follows the calendar year, beginning in April––the month of Helen’s death––and concluding with the title poem. “Neither science nor séance/can bring you back,” Glaser writes, but “What’s better than music/To make old bones move again, that scratch/Of black wax over the blues,//Or maybe, in an eerie E-flat,/The Ghost Variations of Schumann,/Last score before he went mad.” What’s better than Elton Glaser’s verbal music, by turns eerie and gorgeous, to score the split heart of life after a death?
Steven Cramer’s Departures from Rilke began, according to his Afterword, with the sense that “even the most resourceful English versions of Rilke’s New Poems feel ‘old-fashioned’” (Cramer’s revivifying methods include cutting one line from each stanza of the original, and eliminating as many adjectives and adverbs as possible, replacing them with active verbs). Rather than offering “translations, adaptations, or ‘versions,’” poems in Cramer’s Departures are a mind-meld that may “bear some family resemblance to Rilke’s original…but the most wayward…desert Rilke’s premises almost altogether.”
Such a set of premises and procedures I compare to gymnastics on a balance beam. It distinguishes Departures from Ghost Variations (as well as from other versions of Rilke). Yet a reader will find the thrill of verbal music and the play of understanding in the words of both volumes. Here’s a ghostly variation from Departures I’ll read as an example.
Untitled
Dead, she’ll don her shawl,
slip on gloves, her bureau’s scent
replacing essences she wore to best
know herself. Who is she––whose
relative––she long ago quit asking.
Instead, she shadows her footsteps
as she tidies the room, until it warns
her dearest belongings to watch out––
she still alive inside her possessions.
Okay, we have a dead woman getting dressed to go out. The notion of perfume as something worn to please others turns inside out, becoming a spritz of self-knowledge. The existential “Who is she” morphs into a question first about possession, then about family, but both are dismissed. She “shadows” her own footsteps because she’s a shade, but is there a doppleganger lurking as she repeats actions she performed in life? The final inside-out moment occurs when the room “warns/her dearest belongings…/she’s still alive inside her possessions.” Where, exactly is “she”? Can the dead thumb-wrestle with the living in the finger of a glove? The effect is dizzying; Cramer’s language keeps the reader balanced enough to follow his series of Rilke-inspired cartwheels.
I find “Photograph of Ethan Looking at a Globe, 1999” among Cramer’s stellar poems deserting “Rilke’s premises almost altogether.” Poems about photographs begin with tension between the turning world and the stop-time captured in an image; this one begins with a literal globe. As a photograph flattens a spherical object, the poem flattens the child’s “plump look” to a face “round as a watch, brief as an hour.” Both world enough and time contract as the speaker asks his wife, “Do you, like me, sometimes stop to glimpse/his fingers skimming across the North Atlantic,/as though he had all the time in the world?” The equivalence of space and time in the final line––as if Ethan’s ability to span distance equaled his ability to slow time––addresses what relativity feels like.
The poem also probes the premise of a continuous self. Who hasn’t looked at an old photograph and wondered, “What happened to those people?” Now an adult, Ethan “barely has time to keep up with time,” and since Ethan doesn’t speak, the reader can’t know how adult Ethan assimilates the “clarity” of his childhood. Though the speaker dotes on Ethan’s photo, he can’t remember if, at the time, the child touching the world “knew how to spin it.” He doesn’t know if his wife, present when the photo was taken, looks at the photograph now. Cramer employs assurance and doubt to question how our present selves relate to who we were in the past. The poem destabilizes and balances at the same time, the way a tumbler twists and sticks the landing.
I’ve been reading Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars––not about Shakespearian authorship, but about conflicts in scholarly approaches to the text (I didn’t know the “Ur-Hamlet” has been discredited, or that some read the “Bad” Quarto as Shakespeare’s first drafts). Rosenbaum’s search for what makes Shakespeare “Shakespearian” leads him to the notion of “bottomlessness.” It includes the audience’s sense that there is no end to experience in a work of Shakespeare. There are as many ways to read a line of Shakespeare as there are ways to play them, and there are as many ways to play, say, Hamlet as there are multiverses in the reckoning of some physicists. Quantum Shakespeare, is what Rosenbaum calls it.
“Bottomlessness” also implies the sensation of the bottom falling out, the trapdoor opened, the Alice-and-Wonderland drop that I would argue the best poetry achieves. Both Elton Glaser’s Ghost Variations and Steven Cramer’s Departures from Rilke offer moment after moment of both kinds of “bottomlessness.” Whether soaring from a verbal trampoline or dancing across Rilke’s tightrope, both poets make a reader gasp with astonishment.