Variants Thereof

 

“The poem then, whatever its wide cast of characters, is essentially about an imaginary character (not the poet, not me) named Henry, a white American in early middle age sometimes in blackface, who has suffered an irreversible loss and talks about himself sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes even in the second; he has a friend, never named, who addresses him as Mr. Bones and variants thereof.”
—John Berryman, author’s note to The Dream Songs

Poets have long been obsessed with themselves. Put all kinds of writers together in a room and it is the poets, initially standoffish until downing a few cocktails, who are the first to become the conversational bores. We will tell anyone who will listen about the crisis of meaning that sprung up that very morning over coffee, or the Sisyphean nature of waiting for the subway on the weekends, or how we were struck with a Sartre sort of nausea when encountering a dandelion growing between the cracks of the sidewalk and so sat down right then, right there, and wept. We sit down and weep often and everywhere. And we will tell you all about it.
In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster writes that, outside the world of the novel, in our real lives, “We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to,” but poets seem to try their goddamned hardest to do so anyway. Forster says that, in life, “What we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion,” and that this is the function of fictional characters; we, as readers, are granted the privileged stance of seeing into the inner life of someone else.
Two new volumes of poetry, Cynthia Zarin’s The Ada Poems and Paul Legault’s The Madeleine Poems, represent two approaches to book-length, character-based poetry: the persona poem, which uses a character as a mask, and what I will call the portrait poem, which uses a character as a mirror, however warped.
The Ada Poems, Cynthia Zarin’s fourth book of poetry, utilizes a character invented by Vladimir Nabokov in Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle as a conceit for the self. Just as the story of Ada is one of impossible love, Zarin’s volume contains many moments of intense and unquenchable longing that can only live in the world the poems create. “Nothing happened / without you. I want you to see what I see— / I’m talking with your fingers caught in my mouth.” And, “These poems are our daft child— / first wonder, faith’s blue eye, the green-blue planet’s almost haze / that lifts, clouds’ gauze and lingering storm shade….” Other poems express the ever-present obstructions to this love, as in “Fourth Dreamscape (Alexandrine: Roxane and Statiera),”

                          In the dream your wife called to tell me you were dead.
                          She said, this is ‘X,’ I have some news. We hadn’t
                          spoken before but there was little, I could tell,
                          she didn’t know. I said I was sorry. She knew
                          I wasn’t sorry I loved you. I love you still.

One of the most interesting and masterful poems in the volume, at once a parody and a poignant contemporary piece, is “Greek Poem.”

                         You are a managing director
                        of silence.

                         I should have
                         known
                         that silence

                         anywhere.

“Greek Poem” is part of a series of poems woven throughout the book that operate in traditions—“Old-Fashioned Poem,” “Irish Poem,” “Metaphysical Poem”—all of which seem to stem from a Nabokovian impulse to parody various styles and traditions while mastering them.
Ultimately, the use of the Ada persona, while allowing Zarin opportunities to adopt a certain Nabokovian playfulness at times (as in the play on an abecedarian poem, “Poem for a Printing Press”), doesn’t necessarily drive the invention of these poems, but gives the speaker’s own tale of desire and loss a common literary thread that refers to another story of impossible love. The poems, inventive in quieter ways, are beautifully constructed, but do not use character to reinvent the lyric “I.” Instead, the ruse of Ada allows the “I” to say things that perhaps it couldn’t say, to speak of an otherwise unutterable longing, an irreversible loss of love. 
While Zarin’s book utilizes a character as a mask for the self, Paul Legault’s first full-length volume, The Madeleine Poems, like Berryman’sThe Dream Songs, uses a character—speaking in the Berryman vein, sometimes in the first person, sometimes in the third, sometimes in the second—as reflection of and on the self, as well as a commentary on the fluidity of selfhood. In “Madeleine as Portrait of Walt Whitman as Gertrude Stein as a Stripper,” whose very title suggests this fluidity, Legault challenges us (and challenges Madeleine): 

                                                                     Who never aspired 
                                                      to be a word that meant 
                                      secretly Maverick, loose knot, drawn 
                                                     string, and god all at once? 
                      There’s no such name, but you come close, 
                       dark swaggerer. I have seen you over-and
                                       overing. Render each beatitude

         useless. Make us enough for us, beautiful soldier.

And while Madeleine will take on many guises, we are clued into the origin of Madeleine early in the book (which will shape our experience of her masquerades) in “Madeleine as the Homosexuals,” where Legault writes, “My grandmother’s name is a field where men stop their bicycles / on the premise that there will be a luncheon— // Madeleine— // —and get sucked off for the first time / romantically in fields.” Madeleine here is at once a word, an ancestor, and a hall of mirrors reflecting the speaker in oblique, original ways.
Legault takes full advantage of the versatility offered by the introduction of a character into a book of lyric poems, and we get such a range of work, from apostrophes to playful portraits to commentary on what it is to be a self in a world of other selves. In the poem “Madeleine as the Balloon and Size from Here,” a fragmented poem in the vein of Paul Celan, Legault splices narrative moments describing Madeleine’s observations, “Sometimes, in her drunken navigation, she’d admire the elegant shape of a bottle emptying inches past the basket,” with moments of song-like lyrics that make “I” into a third person rather than a first person pronoun, “I wish I was a lizard in the spring. If I’s a lizard in the spring, then I’d hear my darling sing,” and ends the poem with the observation, “We are too much of us.” In another poem, “Madeleine as Yeoman,” Legault writes, “It is less about accuracy as myth,” and we can’t help but read this as a kind of ars poetica for Madeleine and her portraits, and further, as an ars poetica for the depiction of the life of any character in a work of art. 
Where Zarin’s The Ada Poems contains a variety of first person lyrics that use character as a persona, Legault’s first book contains multitudes of portraits of a character, Madeleine, as objects, ideas, places, twice-removed personas, poetic forms and subversions of those forms. And still “they were all the same / name to call to, ignoble godheads, all of us,” and, as Legault says himself, “Some debut.”
On the relatively rare occasions when a volume of contemporary poetry follows a fictional character, the verse has the potential to stretch beyond the same old barbaric yawp to actually contain multitudes. Just as some of the most revered novelists, like Vladimir Nabokov, utilize aspects of poetry—cadences, wordplay—poets should consider ransacking aspects of novels to reshape and revitalize contemporary American poetry.
We cannot understand each other, we cannot reveal ourselves, and yet we feel like we know Humbert Humbert, Clarissa Dalloway, Madame Bovary, Stephen Dedalus, through and through. T. S. Eliot writes that “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” And still, even if we attempt to escape from personality, whatever character a writer—novelist or poet—invents, that character and his or her story will still be an invention of the writer’s self and the variants thereof. There is still something of Rembrandt in the portraits he does of others.