Fjords Reviews

POETRY
Poetic Fuel

Fuel for Love
by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
Page Count: 34 pages
SurVision Books (Dublin, Ireland and Reggio di Calabria, Italy)
ISBN:978-1-912-96345-4

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright’s new book–the latest of many: Fuel for Love. Everyone knows Jeff Wright–as editor-publisher-curator-impressario and poet. Go to any reading in New York south of 14th St or in Brooklyn and Jeff either has organized it, is reading in it, or just has showed up because he’s a friend of the readers. But amid all these guises and journeys, he is a real poet and a good one. He has a lineage. He studied with Allen Ginsberg, was a friend of Ted Berrigan, can be considered a third-generation New York Poet, a bit younger than Ron Padgett and David Shapiro. There’s something of Padgett (and through Padgett to Frank O’Hara) in his voice–his humor, his feeling for the city as a place of possibility, happenstance, and astonishment, his refusal to take life–his life–so seriously (and yet living it and acknowledging its entailments). His poems teeter on the precipice of the Serious, but maintain the discipline not to blunder into such an enjambment of no return. I think with Jeff, that discipline is called “wit.”

I’ll say two words about Fuel for Love: Sonnets and Puns.

All the poems in the book are sonnets (all thirty of them, a short book); or all but one. That is, they’re all fourteen lines (except for the one that is twelve). And that’s one definition of a sonnet, from Petrarch till now–some verbal fuel for love, poured into a fourteen line vessel. And these are energetic sonnets, sonnets at play, for they take many different forms. Four of the sonnets are in what we might call classic form... the Shakespearean sonnet of three stanzas of four lines each, plus a couplet at the end. Four sonnets reverse this form, having four stanzas of three lines plus a couplet. There are six sonnets composed entirely of couplets (seven couplets). And then there are fifteen sonnets in particular irregular forms: stanzas of 6-6-2 lines; 3-1-4-1-1-2-2; 4-3-7; 3-2-4-1-4; 5-5-4; 4-3-4-1-2.... You get the picture. Jeff’s friend and mentor, Ted Berrigan, of course wrote great sonnets, but Berrigan did not play with form like this. It seems to me that this is the most imaginative set of variations on the sonnet form since Philip Sidney’s astonishing performances in Stella and Astrophil in 1591, and even Sidney didn’t chop and stretch the sonnet the way that Jeff does. (Not to say that Jeff’s poems are better because nobody’s poems are better than Sidney’s, that is, at least as formal artefacts!).

This variation of stanzas within the sonnet form is both ingenious and purposeful. The stanza, for Wright, is a unit of thought and sound, or breath. Something of what Charles Olsen theorized concerning the poetic line as the essential sonic and semantic unit of a poem, Jeff does with the stanza. The variation of the stanzas is not random experiment; it follows from voice and meaning. There is enjambment of lines within stanzas, but never between stanzas. The stanza is a solid unit of thought and rhythm. As the poem breathes semantically, a pattern of stanzas is initiated. Here is the title poem, “Fuel for Love.”

This is an impressive poem–its revision of sunset over the Hudson as a sort of volcanic irruption of light and substance–its “fiery slag.” And from there, we get an incessant experience of image, metaphor, and physical tongue-turning that arrives at an ending that rather gorgeously refuses to stay still or in one direction: “squeezed out of an antique compass,” which is very nice. And then, that driver who checks the mirror–that is, looks back behind him–and is that only physical or also temporal? I take it as both. And then the paradoxes of the closing couplet: How does one “cash in” on “tokens of distance”? Where are they? How would one possess such things, by definition elsewhere? And what is it that “we run on”? Is that the fuel of the poem? And how does it “expand as it diminishes”? The tokens of distance, the driver’s signal after checking the mirror; the impossible equilibrium of expansion and diminishment.

The title of the poem, and of the book, is, as is obvious, a pun. Fuel for love; fool for love. Or, by some air extension woven out, Food for Thought? Puns are important in this book; and the extensions or associations that may follow from them. The “fuel” is a “fool.” the fuel for love is folly. Or food. If music is the food of love? Or if folly is the food for thought? Or, if the fool would persist in his folly he would become love, or fuel? Or folly is what is consumed as love is reached? How much love is gained (or lost) per liter of folly?

In Fuel for Love, there are eighteen puns, including that in the title. This is in a book of thirty pages, one poem to a page. This seems to me a lot of puns for a book of this length. Puns seem to be a structuring, connective force in the book, a mode through which the poems think. We tend to put down puns. We groan at puns; we apologize for them (No pun intended, we say–and yet we do intend it!). They draw on chance, on mere sonic resemblance, rather than on the presumed deeper commonalities that instigate metaphor, the pun’s aristocratic cousin. But the good pun, the expansive pun allows and insists on its wider range of association that its randomness makes possible.

One more example: The book’s first poem, “The Quick Key,” ends with a couplet and a pun: “Razor-thin euphoria is a wake-up call./ The party is here–inside these cells.” These cells. The party is in a physical space–these cells; but is the party then in a prison, a monastery? But the first line referred to “euphoria,” so are the cells then biological cells, neurons? But then might not the “cells” also be components of the poem, stanzas? “Stanza” is Italian for “room.” Thus John Donne’s pun, “We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms.” Yes, yes, and yes. The party is here. Euphoria and confinement; the mind as nutshell of infinite space; encountered and experienced through the poem’s formal arrangement. “The Quick Key,” which begins “Ever-shrinking path to glory’s kennel,” indicates already a relation between enclosed space (physical, neural, or aesthetic)—which may seem the opposite of glorious; a kennel, a cell– –and the possibility of some ecstatic release: glory or euphoria. And “cells” here is not a metaphor. It does not stand for some other meaning or coexist with some other meaning or point toward some other meaning adjacent to itself. It does not “carry across” to some other semantic place. No, it contains in itself disparate meanings that build on and conflict with each other. This is the richness of the pun that is central to Jeff Wright’s method of writing.

Perhaps, at last, the “fuel for love” is the poem itself: the conjoined acts of observation, feeling, and invention that connect consciousness to world–that apprehension of the fiery slag of sunset, the bruised fruit, the signal, the expanding-contracting nature of being in the world and using language and being in love with both. What folly, what fuel!

Oh, and I don’t know why the one poem has only twelve lines.