Although I am a worshipper of Emily Dickinson, I can’t say that I am big on the Transcendentalists—a literary category in which she is often place due to the Emersonian influence (supposedly) on her work. In my view, Emmy digs in with a bit more spirit than, say, Whitman and with a bit more real-time burn that ol’ Thoreau. What generally turns me off about the canonical Transcendentalists and Romanticists is their OCD-level compulsion to seek human spirit and optimism mainly through pastoral and aesthetically beautiful imagery, and their idea that they voice the everyman and everywoman via the enlightened state—the specialness—of the poet. That bugs me. Who died and ordained your experience as universal? Ah, you did.
According to the rules, it is not the final product as much as it the experience of the poem that is meant to spark the everyday schlep’s inner nature—that connection to It that provides the revelations or warm fuzziness meant to take us out of the coal mine that is the work-a-day maya. A look at Emmy’s work and you get why they want to us to look at our condition by making it prettier, more digestible—reverent. I like Emmy because she is like the cutter of the Transcendies. She wants it to fucking ache, and I like my poetry shit-in-your-teeth ugly and hit-the-pavement real. Got a dead narrator and funerary imagery that calls bullshit on our fear of mortality and our need to cling to the material crap like a dryer sheet? Sweet. My thing is that burns hurt—that’s transcendent and sloppy. Graceful? Oh hell no.
Leo Victor Briones, on the other hand, tends to make it pretty, and he is good at it, which explains why he describes The Poet Remains (EP, 2006), his recent collection, as “Transcendental Revivalism.” Most of the poems in The Poet Remains work to invoke the very state desired by the classic movement. “Making Moves,” for example, explores the existential question with the deftness of a seasoned poet; yet, the imagery is a bit cliché and the tropes are a kinda tired. The notion of the hand of God or Great Being “that hovers above” a “great checker board” of life doesn’t push the free will/fate opposition any further than it did in Whitman’s time. In the final stanza, Briones employs the similarly overused notion that “we are but masons / who brick-by-brick build the pillars / of our own good fortunes.” I get the sentiment; however, it is the sentimentality that irks me.
Fortunately, Briones’s
game is a multidimensional one. As the collection moves a bit away
from the Transcendentalist’s gaze, his poems get stronger and his
voice more, well, cutting. In “Romancing Poverty,” Briones employs
irony for a moving look at international economic disparity, while
“Beverly Hills Bohemian” tackles the meter and language of spit poetry
to explore the appropriation, exploitation, and commercialization
of art movements to please the wallets of a consuming mass. In other
words, his voice is sharpest when not musing about his muses, as in
“Upon Entering the River Lethe and Meeting Alan Ginsberg” and “Collect
Call.” In these poems, the poet is far too present and the process
far too softened—the intention to image the poet and the process displaces
the reader and creates a narrator that reads as pretentious, despite
the strength of Briones’s craft. It is a let down, especially when
followed by such gems as “The Prophet of
While I don’t always align with his metaphorical chakras and poetic channeling, Briones’s attention to craft and his occasional grind does make me warm and fuzzy. The collection feels as though Briones is attempting to write into a chosen voice while plugging in bits and pieces of his own along the way. This is definitely the sign of a talented poet, but I am left wondering if The Poet Remains is a true Briones artifact, one that adequately reps his obvious poetic possibility.
