Yesterday, I was teaching students about the Romantic quality people might sense in “raw” writing. Where “rawness” is a poetic style that expresses feeling and consequence—it is one way a poem gathers authority to itself. It’s a quality I think informs the poems in Grand Tour, but I constantly feel myself screened out. Like the poems are operating under a presumption of authenticity, they are aware there is truth to the poet’s biography. But, for my reading, I don’t feel access to that raw touchstone, even as I see the subtle gestures telling me it’s there.
This quality is best illustrated in one of opening poems, “Roman Triptych.” “Reader, I want you to know you are reading a poem.” She says. Introducing self-awareness in poems that already feel self-contained is a vulnerable poetic move. So why is Gonzalez instructing me to remember what I already know I’m doing? Has the poem really risen to this moment of testament? Because I would like to see a reason the poem is laying itself bare. And the poems, up to that point (and throughout the book, if I’m being honest), don’t seem to be doing anything but what you would expect a poem to be doing. Their subject matter is what poems often talk about. And, perhaps most critically, the person Gonzalez describes herself as, a Yale graduate who has with good reason accepted the privilege that can come with a pedigree, is now writing poems. The book operates within that lifestyle until it reaches a sustained consideration of her traumatic childhood in the final poems. I wonder, however, about the poet’s self-fashioning this early in the book. Where it doesn’t feel so surprising for a poet to say, “I’m making a poem now!”
And though this explicit meta-commentary connecting poet and poem (or more specifically connecting the poet’s presumed reader with her poems) doesn’t really appear in other poems, there are other kinds of self-realizations. Like when the poet declares herself a bisexual in “Epistemology of the Shower.” And it’s this stance of declaration, used in most of the poems, that tilts the poems in my reading. Declaration screens from me the truth that throws the poet into declaring these things rather than granting the direct access a declarative statement would carry. It’s so intentional and poetic. And it influences how everything else in the poem sounds. Like in “An Arrangement of the Beginning,” where the poem paints an impressionistic poetic scene, I read a line like, “Rain. Flight from rain. / Rain in the eyes.” carrying too much purpose. It’s an Image. Intended for Poetic Gesture. This is the tilt. Which just feels like it’s calling too much intention to its poeticness.
It reminds me of this book I read a while ago. Linda Gregg’s Chosen by the Lion. I had read Too Bright to See just previous, which I’d truly loved. But Chosen by the Lion just felt too purposed. Too aware of offering a reader The Poetic Take on visiting Vietnam. Gonzalez has similar notes in this book’s poems about Cyprus and Poland. I can hear the sharpened and capable poetic gaze that gathers details, that understands the impacts of life on incidental relationships. There is this way the poems frame what any travel meant to her. And I have no doubt there are readers who would hear the expressive quality in these poems. But what I hear as this presumptive tilt keeps me from feeling the poems in that way.
Even in fraught poetic moments, like in the poem, “A Tuesday in May,” when missionaries approach her and her mother as they move the body of her dead grandmother out of the house, and the two people impose themselves on this scene, I would prefer more complicated and chaotic details from the scene to overcome the Poetic Moment-ness the poem is occupied with. There may be readers who would say Gonzalez employs restraint here. If it’s meant as restraint, it’s just too much being held out for me.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.