Why Feel Bad About Beauty?

The title of Maureen N. McLane’s new selected poems, More Anon (FSG, 2021), promises more poems soon, as in, I have made a selection from my first five books, but fear not, I shall write More Anon. More modestly, it also identifies these as additional poems written by Anon—that is, by an anonymous person. In the background is Virginia Woolf’s declaration from A Room of One’s Own: “Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” 

It’s a complex allusion. Published in 1929, A Room of One’s Own addresses not just the fact of female voices silenced across history but also the patriarchy’s power to contort even modern (white) women’s imaginations. Woolf reads anonymity as a problematic refuge from the convention dictating that “publicity in a woman is detestable.” This notion—a “relic of the sense of chastity”—was fatal to the 16th-century female writer; modernity notwithstanding, Woolf argues, the 20th-century female writer is still plagued. “Anonymity runs in their blood,” she writes. “The desire to be veiled still possesses them.” Nearly 100 years after Woolf’s essay, McLane’s double-voiced gesture indexes the “desire to be veiled,” even as McLane asserts the future of her (writing as Anon) poetic virility with a bit of Shakespearean swagger.

Also in the background are the particulars of McLane’s generation and education. Born in upstate New York in 1967, she graduated from Harvard in 1989, studied literature at Oxford, and completed a PhD in British Romanticism at the University of Chicago. She wears on her sleeve, albeit not lightly, her apprenticeship to an Anglo-American poetic canon presented to her (and my) generation of undergraduates—perhaps the last students for whom this was true—as the canon, though one comprised of works by writers almost entirely white and mostly male. Yet the 1990s, the decade in which McLane did her doctoral degree, was otherwise a high point of academic reckoning about canons, their history, and the critical responsibilities and aims of literature departments in the light of poststructuralism, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, and the rise of the New Historicism. Think of the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha asking in 1997, “What authorizes the postfoundational humanities?”, and then think of that question’s particular challenge for a recent Harvard graduate trained at the feet of the formalist critic Helen Vendler to master—subtly, sensitively, and reverently—the Anglo-American lyric canon.

McLane cites Bhabha’s question in Romanticism and the Human Sciences (2000), her first published book and an outgrowth of her doctoral study. Steeped in critical theory, anthropology, and history, the book explores what “the human” meant to Romantic writers in England around the turn of the 19th century and how discourses of natural and biological sciences of the human informed theories of the imagination and poetry— for Romantics, the ultimate sign of human specialness. McLane calls the book “a long meditation on the status of poetry, in England around 1800” and “indirectly” in her own academic moment and milieu. The book’s subplot is her search, as an emerging poet, for a reasonable, ethical defense of Poetry (that Romantic canon she’d received) against the “anti- or post-humanist contempt for literature.” Can one, she asks, “endorse a Wordsworthian or Shelleyan vision of poetry … without committing oneself to their proposal of poetry as an imperial, universal and universalizing project”? The answer for McLane is “it’s complicated.” She has called her “core muse” ambivalence, “especially ambivalence about Romantic poetry,” and she has spent considerable time exploring countermodels and reactions to Romanticism from American modernists such as Gertrude Stein and contemporary avant-garde poets such as Susan Howe. The result is an erudite, wide-ranging, self-conscious, open-minded critical sensibility that informs McLane’s poetry as well as her prose, including her 2012 book of autobiographical, poeticritical essays, My Poets (not represented in More Anon). 

It’s no surprise then that McLane is one of the most allusive poets around. Many poems in More Anon, especially those from early in her career, invoke poets’ names—Stein, Horace, Wordsworth, Shelley, Lowell, Chaucer, Yeats—or borrow the lines or rhetorical stances of other poets, trying out traditional forms and tropes. From the book’s start, one sees the variety of her poetic terrain (although white writers nonetheless dominate). Opening epigraphs come from H.D., Alice Notley, William Blake, and T.R. Malthus. Two envois spoken by lovers frame the collection, one alluding to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the other, perhaps, to Orpheus’s fatal glance at Eurydice. I hear Frank O’Hara in the jumpy, faux-naïve opening lines of “Terrible things are happening…”, selected from her first collection, Same Life (2008): 

Terrible things are happening
                                       in Russian novels!
 
Just yesterday I heard
                             in the café
 
                     of two peasants, long friends,
 
       one in sudden possession
                                           of a watch
                                                           hanging
                                                                   from a gold chain

McLane’s mingling of the Russian novel’s plot with the narrator’s present-tense situation (the café, and, gradually, grief at a love affair’s ending) owes a debt to O’Hara’s “Poem (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!),” in which O’Hara considers his own “perfectly disgraceful” behavior at parties via a headline about the American starlet’s swooning. Both poets are interested in exposing the history, news, and literature that mediate one’s personal experience. McLane often shows the minds of her personae as ineluctably shaped by other texts and writers’ lives (and vice versa), as in “Excursion Susan Sontag,” which begins, as if in medias res,

Now Susan Sontag was famous
among certain people—you know
who I mean—urban informed culturally
literate East Coast people and some West
a few in Chicago in Europe and elsewhere although
Susan Sontag came from Arizona
which is remarkable
only if you hold certain prejudices
about Arizona which I do
having been there twice
and disliking it both times
not that this was Arizona’s fault
it is majestic strange lunar orange desert
flat and then ravine-ridden but Phoenix
is heinous unless you have a certain
po-mo sensibility I associate with men
of a certain age and race and while
I share the supposed race I’m not a man although
there are men in Arizona but I forgot
to ask them what they thought
about the state or Susan Sontag

The poem goes on for almost 100 more lines, and McLane’s enjambments reveal character entangled in—that is, shaped by and shaping—the historical particulars the poem’s “I” seeks to explain and rise above. Among those particulars are “what happened to America,” post-9/11 “media complicity,” sexual repression, the possibilities and limits of knowledge, and the passing of intellectual ages, all of it ending with a riff on Dylan Thomas’s famous elegy: “… must old rockers and ACT UP veterans / and the Situationist International and Sontag all go /gentle into no that good that no that raging.” 

McLane is thinking about her own intellectual moment here, as well as the tendency of every intellectual moment to pass. She longs for the Sontag who might counter the lamentable “progress” of the US capitalist imperial war machine, but the poem’s associative rush, with no periods and few pauses, suggests there is no still point in which to find the pure Sontag (or self-image) for which she longs. In many poems across her career—“Letter from Paris” and the Randall Jarrell-esque “Poem (As a man may go to Costco…)” from her first collection, “Au Revoir” from World Enough (2010), and “Prospect” and the brilliant “Girls in Bed” from Some Say (2017)—McLane evokes “the deep under[link]” between 18th-century European ideals and the contemporary horrors informing “first world” experience. “I am drawing up an indictment / of the French / & Reason / & Human Rights / which begins by unlinking these concepts / and concludes in weeping,” she writes in “Letter from Paris.” McLane plays often with the fact that the desire to rise above one’s bad historical inheritances—perhaps by turning to poetry—has itself a bad history, as in “Prospect,” in which she invokes the signature mountaintop vantage beloved by European Romantics and the English “prospect poem” to imagine modernity’s undoing: “Let all the centuries collapse / into endless columns of clouds / we the survivors look on.”

Ambitious as many of the poems in McLane’s first book are, and predictive of later successes, Same Life suggests a mockingbird poet in pursuit of varying styles. Her second book, World Enough, and her third, This Blue (2014), a finalist for the National Book Award, find her settling into her remarkable ear for music and rhythm. Bright in their directness and clarity, the longer sequences of short, epigrammatic poems in these books also showcase her precision with parataxis, image, and line. Here is the first poem from a lengthier meditation on time and change, “Passage I,” which appears in World Enough: 

little moth
I do not think you’ll escape
this night
 
I do not think
you’ll escape this night
little moth.

McLane is a master of syntax (“syntax” is the title of one of her most anthologized poems); here, the words’ reconfiguration across the stanza break reveals the power of a small syntactic difference to effect profound change. The poem slows and recasts its initial emphasis on the here and now (“this night”), which shifts the scale of time and sadness from the relative inconsequence of moth death in world time to something more ponderous and human. Night becomes a metaphor, and the human “I” is no more enduring than the “little moth.” In this, the poem also deftly checks the casual anthropocentrism of its first three lines. It’s difficult to achieve so much, to register a shift in feeling and the full implication of a moment’s thought, in only six lines made of 10 words.

Many of McLane’s poems impress in this way. Even poems that initially seem slight or conversational will, when read again, show how carefully they’ve been made to engender thinking about how they’ve been made—their linguistic mastery. The poems also invite thinking about what they unmake, or interrupt, of sedimented ideas that everyday speech and cliché carry forward like stowaways. In many of McLane’s poems, especially the narrow, compressed poems of This Blue, the poet frames speech emerging, a process of slow dawning, through drift, error, and correction. “What’s the Matter,” for example, looks closely at the titular phrase to reveal the nature of remorse:

All day I stayed in bed.
It seemed someone else
must have been alive
 
have done what I did.
Failed to do
what I failed to.
 
It’s still in my head
these things I did
and said and cared for
 
doing but it’s all gone
white like green hills
in certain light
 
as Dante says the hillsides
can go white
in the middle of a new life.

The poem’s edgy progression explores the limits (the “certain light”) of psychic strategies to manage loss, including the presumption that what is immaterial or gone will stop paining she who has lost it. The poem is melancholy: has one turned the page in forgetting or just gone blank? Pressuring the commonplace expression “what’s the matter” via syntax and line, McLane posits that often “the matter” is a lack of matter (something not present, wanted, or missed). New thought and feeling spark from the familiar phrase. “It’s still in my head” makes me think twice about still and in. Has someone died? What’s lost is not “in” the head. The line returns readers again to the word matter. This kind of annotative syntax, to borrow a term from the poet and critic James Longenbach, enjambs lines to isolate phrases and words unnaturally, allowing language to display what it admits to or staves off, how it might carry one into and out of metaphysical presumptions (“immateriality” as unimportance, say) that want scrutiny. McLane gestures to the problem of being borne along by language in one of the triolets that make up “Songs of a Season II,” from World Enough:

The language bore me along.
Before I knew anything
There was its welcoming song—
The language bore me along.
Strange to have gotten so wrong
So much, to know nothing
But language that bore me along
Before I knew anything.

Though McLane’s work evidences the range of subjects that song and set-form poems–triolets, sonnets, palinodes, blues, and ghazals–foster and complicate, she knows well that those forms’ repetitions, turns, and returns lend themselves to writing about love, sex, and other pleasures that one wants to have or keep. The ghazal “For You,” from Some Say, revolves around the almost unbearable pleasure of waking before the beloved whose response one so badly craves; its repetitions of “for you” and “before you” through its 11 couplets work like chiming bells:

I hear the church bells ring before you.
Most days it’s true the birds are up before you.
 
I should make the coffee, as I am up before you.
I might just lie here though before you
 
wake up. Let me look at you, since I am here before you.
I am so rarely simply quiet before you.

An amateur musician, McLane has said she writes in part because a “rhythm seizes” her that she wants to share. Yet poems across her career find her looking askance at her own skill at making well-wrought poems, along with her Romantic lyric background and her desire for beauty to enchant the world: 

In the morning the hummingbird
In the evening five deer
 
Why should I feel bad
about beauty?

That question could work as a lodestone for all five books represented in More Anon. Many of her poems explore privilege, first-worldness, egotism, environmental destruction, subjectivity, identity, power, and patriarchy and indicate McLane’s deeper inquiry into how “her” poetic tradition—specifically the personal, meditative lyric—might be implicated in perpetuating harm. In “Au Revoir,” from World Enough, McLane berates herself for writing “another first-world poem”:

annoying in all its presumption
its feckless tourism presupposing a home
and its hubris misregarding itself as gumption.

The poem explores this “feckless tourism” formally, in quatrains whose declarative sentences at first seem disconnected and discrete—

We did not go to Versailles.
The ocean did not turn over.
The moon remained unmanned
and two teams called out Red Rover Red Rover.
 
Did Fisher-Price furnish our minds
with a transportable imaginaire?
George Bush the first said he liked pork rinds.
My name not Mary my self contrary.

—but faintly bespeak sinister connections among their terms: European travel, stress on ocean ecology, space exploration, children’s games, the Bush oligarchy, and that “transportable imaginaire” that allows one to look away. For McLane, that mindset implicates the formal containment and autobiographical myopia of the “first-world poem,” which seems to enable tolerance for the fact that “things are always terrible / for some people.” In “Enough with the Swan Song,” from This Blue, McLane casts her own lyric urges as a “swan song” to give up in the face of nature’s indifference.

McLane works at these knots in each book, most notably and ambitiously in Mz N: the serial: A Poem-in-Episodes (2016), a queer, feminist, semi-autobiographical bildungsroman and ars poetica that tracks “the growth of a poet’s mind.” In the opening “PROEM: Mz N Contemporary,” she again raises the inwardness of “lyric” as a containment space about which she feels deeply ambivalent:  

Mz N’s deep
inwardness
is positively
German an unfashionable
Innerlichkeit
best cordoned off
in the foreign
dead field of lyric

The N in Mz N suggests it is part pseudonym, drawn from McLane’s middle initial, but also a version of Anon, no one—“a tale / about nothing”—with N a variable standing in for the female writer:

Mz N tries
each day very hard
to be contemporary
One must be
absolutely
contemporary
they’ve harangued
her for over
a hundred years
& who is she
to object?

If she is Anon, fragilely on the verge of nonexistence, comfortable in the dead lyric but trying to find a more lively mode by which to be recognized across the Mz N poems, she is also McLane: one reads of Mz N’s childhood in New York, Cambridge in 1989, an uneasy awakening out of bad sex with a boyfriend and into lesbian relationships, dawning awareness of herself as perhaps out of step with her time, “belated / to herself,” and negotiating “the crazed mirror / of her self-absorption” and a “queer / remoteness” that may or may not have something to do with McLane’s stated tendency to ambivalence and her ability to morph through her poetic gifts. Mz N is subjected to a good deal of close inspection and critique in these poems. Freedom to experiment comes with the narrative stance (sometimes first person, more often third) and the episodic cast, which allows McLane to explore a variety of influences, efforts, failures, and gains and to make good critical and psychological use of her own magpie tendencies. Mz N is a sort of embarrassing Berryman figure objectifying women in one poem (“Mz N Nothing”) but then critiquing her Shelleyan impulses (a saving gesture) in the next (“Mz N Triumph of Life”). In “Mz N Palinode,” the last poem offered of the selection, she is the emblem of lyric shame: 

Just like you
to sing a flower song
of love     ignore
the lash of labor
you’re not under
 
Just like you
to lean on a lyre
float in a meadow
when the cracking world
needs action, facts

More Anon dazzles for the fineness of McLane’s formal precision, her searching intellectualism, and her commitment to ethical questioning and growth. She theorizes her sense of identity as ongoing, as never not emergent, as the shifting sum of a set of possible performances. “There are many questions I have been brought to pose to myself,” she writes in a recent essay on contemporary poetics. “Other questions I have needed to abandon or reframe.” More Anon attests to the brilliance of her answers, which are never final, more anon.