Two poets against Wordsworth.

People with Real Lives Don’t Need Landscapes
By John Dolan
Auckland University, 88 pages, $10.99

The Strange Hours Travelers Keep: Poems
By August Kleinzahler
Farrar Straus & Giroux, 112 pages, $22.00

John Dolan’s third poetry book is a collection of boy poems. Not in the sense of boy band or laddie magazine, but because they admit that boys do stupid things, like jump out in front of cars, put mice into the oven or, more charmingly, wear cloaks and play at being Tolkien elves. This young time of grooving on the gross and its illogical thought processes follows us around as much as any Wordsworthian engorement on landscape, or Ginsberg’s yawping love. Dolan doesn’t read portents into the strange mind-trips of suburban boys. Instead he places them alongside their descendents, the strange boy-mind-trips grown men take. I’m not speaking of power mowers, but of that little voice that wouldn’t mind taking out a chunk of city block with a rocket launcher. Welcome to your own mind; welcome to Columbine.

Dolan’s poems are dead earnest, passionate and more than a bit political. In a few, he sounds like British poet Tony Harrison going on about soccer, but the fearless description of his own impulses makes the book disturb and burn. When faced with the choice between craft and passion, Dolan follows Coleridge and goes with passion (note the anti-Wordsworthian title).

Dolan’s postmodern angst is not the usual affectation–like boxers hanging out the back of prep-school Levis–but a man’s understandable, even healthy unease with the violence of his mind and his world. The poignancy is that, as a white man of the West, he knows his mind will become the world–the dark side of the patriarchal power trip. Many poets don’t get it. They go for cultural vertigo, or pull a "poor-me" strategy lamenting modern life’s banal inauthenticity. Well, life was banal before Tudor Will left Anne Hathaway his second-best bed, and inauthentic before Socrates and the rest dreamed up Western philosophy as an attempt to seduce lovely Alcibiades. Postmodern angst comes from people, usually men, looking at how little control we have over the things that really mean something to us (community, legislation, that movie star we want to have sex with), noting the violence inherent in this relationship, and noting that something in us grooves on violence.

Dolan is no master craftsman. There is little sense of "word as beautiful thing," or troubled, poignant thing here. He’s a poet of the concrete. For instance, "Damnation," about the afterlife, contains neither sentiment nor hyperbole:

and ends with God saying,

You shouldn’t have joined a band.

No big speeches, but we get the point. He later envisions trilobites enacting a class-action suit against multi celled organisms. It’s boy-philosophy revisited by a man, taking the ridiculous to another extreme, and it sounds just right. Or in a long poem, "...Late Brunch/of the Dead–with those/resonant malls-full of zombie/nuns." As a reader, I believe in these zombie nuns far more than any contemporary, Plath-style confession. Later in the same poem, "Democracy/in action: Resolved,/you dead people are not entitled to walk up and eat us/alive...Because/(A) It’s not our fault and/(B) we’re taller." This is kid logic. Ask your seven-year-old-brother. It makes sense.

Dolan’s risky experiments sometimes blow up. But I’d rather have poems willing to try something wild and screw up royally than milquetoast that fears mistakes. Dolan describes baking a mouse (it doesn’t die until he adds newspaper), has, inexplicably, a lot of Mongols and dead Ukrainians in one poem and has a short poem-play on the life of a cyanide molecule on a murder bullet. Not all of the poems work, but they are all worth reading. And Dolan gets middle-class horror right, without either posing as victim or pretending the middle-class development is a "special hell" cut off from all other hells we’ve created. And when he gets wistful, it involves adolescent boys pretending to be obscure characters from the Silmarillion. That’s the real suburban sublime.

Kleinzahler too is anti-Wordsworthian, resisting poetic elevation, as a good anti-Wordsworthian ought. He doesn’t stare into the sky and feel his heart swell. His sky is filled with "the debris of space/The countless trade-names... Together they make up a kind of tune. Your tune." (Deft turns are one of the pleasures of reading Kleinzahler.) As in Wordsworth, something "out there" stares back at the speaker, and seems to have its own consciousness. But here it’s not the sublime that stares back; it’s our own junk. To add insult to injury, our own junk doesn’t necessarily look trashy and banal. I mean, if it looked like our Aunt Hilda in her rollers and bathrobe, at least we could feel sorry for ourselves. Kleinzahler doesn’t let us off that easily. He won’t let us divide the world neatly into spoiled and unspoiled.

Kleinzahler is a City Lights poet, part of a group that started in San Francisco when Kenneth Rexroth mentored Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg and others. So Kleinzahler’s at least half-beat, or beat-the-next-generation, and therefore a poet of list-poems. And it’s in the list-poems that he falls flat. A previous book, Red Sauce, Whisky & Snow was full of smart, careful poems in which words glowed on the page. But here the carefulness, while it’s not mannered, doesn’t invoke deep feeling when it heads into list-mode. "Tequila and sandals/Methamphetamines/
Humping it all the way to Brownsville" is predictable, not nostalgic as it should be, and certainly not raw. And he doesn’t sound the depths of why mass culture beguiles and bothers us. "How happy we are with our gimcrack horrors," he writes, "but why are we happy with them?" As a cultural link to the Great Yawp, Kleinzahler should be our wise guide here, and he isn’t.

Sometimes the old strange glory, the beat rebellion against hairspray culture is back, and it’s worth reading him to hear it in modern times, because it’s real, and because we need it. But unlike Dolan’s book, Kleinzahler’s lacks the light that bites and terrifies.