Eric Gelsinger

Brooklyn, New York

Shane Meyer and I made a bet. And now, thanks to a couple rogue referees, I have to produce writing according to Shane’s direction. Somebody called an offensive foul on Dwayne Wade, I won’t get into it, but I have to produce, and the subject matter and form are up to Mr. Meyer. So what does he have me do? Well perhaps I’m not the most travelled and interesting of souls, but even the most downtrodden of our race is allotted a share of the unique and miraculous. Meek and obscure as I am, it’s arguable my allotment has been overly-generous: some accounting error in the ledgers of luck. As a result, I’ve hit the roads from Canada to Patagonia, slept atop ancient pyramids, been attacked by a puma, dined with presidents, professors, Nobelists, celebrities. I’ve had my life threatened, I’ve saved a life. I’ve had visions. Been intimate with the poorest of the poor and the richest of the rich: El Basurero to East Hampton; Bulgarian backwater hamlets to the high halls of Oxbridge. I’ve worked at bars in Guatemala, hedge funds in New York, United Nations headquarters, and call centers in Depew. Benighted and befuddled as the rest of the race, I nevertheless have learned a thing or two. And how does Mr. Meyer choose to utilize me? He’s cashed in his chips for a review of his own “book” of “poetry,” The Current Mood.

You may have noticed the quotes around “book” and “poetry.” They’re not there by accident. I don’t know what to call a wad of badly cut computer papers trapped together by a couple cheap staples -- heaven forbid he splurge on that bankbreaking third staple -- so I suppose “book” will have to do. And as for the “poetry?” I’m afraid that’s what our contract obligates me to examine at greater length, and so here goes, for better or worse.

Let us begin by turning at random through the alphabetically arranged titles to the poem Numb which I’ll transcribe here in full (though without the charming typos and formatting mistakes):

Numb

Now, no pleasure
will interfere with shore
the feeling is too even
to be called give or take.

At birth,
(such simple verse)
or other times unremembered
depth had its form for its purpose
to be heard was the thing.
To be heard like that again!
Then death.
Same song, resung
but this time
within the silence
of experience.

Meyer lucks out: this isn’t the worst he could do. The notion of being heard as a newborn’s birth-wail is heard: with that rapt attention to a matter of life or death: is a powerful notion. The birth-wail’s counterpoint in death is silence, which the poet attributes to experience: the wisdom that all life’s wailing, crying, speaking, singing, laughing, it was all for naught. Does the poet believe what he’s saying? Perhaps he does, for if we flip further, we find the book ends prematurely with the poem, Recumbant [sic]. Meyer’s “experience” apparently led him to abandon the project before elaborating such moods as “Sassy,” “Triumphant,” or “Understimulated.” Yet, he still found it fit to publish the aborted emotional guide-book so as usual there’s no telling what the addled young poet believes. If a clue is to be found in Numb’s first stanza, it will do this reader no good, for I candidly profess complete non-understanding of its meaning.

Fearful of infected paper cuts lest I again flip the mangled pages of this ragtag text, I’ll turn my attention to the verso of the already open book, and to the poem Nauseated. In full:

Nauseated

The further away I get from my body
the more it fills
with a less dense element
which when in proper proportion
is the one that spurts me
from the canister
in a fluffy, decorative burst.

LISTEN HERE:
Trying to explain
my outlandish organization
is like trying to cram
whipped cream
back into the can.

Like the mystifying initial stanza of the previous poem, the first lines remind me of the scholastic obscurity which brought power and fame to the likes of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas just 750 short years ago. I’ll hazard a prediction here to say that the modus dominicus is unlikely to do the same favors for Mr. Meyer. However, the poet redeems the piece by using a startlingly humorous image rather than theological prose to culminate his thought, in a rare and welcome victory for phanopoeia over logopoeia in Meyer’s I can’t believe it’s the 21st century opus.

It’s worth pausing here to consider the incongruity of Meyer’s gimmicky (and therefore ultra-contemporary) premise and his own obvious predilections for musty texts written in dead languages. Take these lines from Geeky:

Therein hung,
hic et illic
(with harmless emphasis)
tituli
sprung from . . .

a conceit he continues in the very next poem Giggly which beings with the line “Hiccup, gulp” and includes the Latinate “flocculent” (having a fluffy or woolly appearance) along with “Whoops” and “ohhhh!” and ends with “phew.” I know the poet and his taste (and ability) for Latin, Greek, German; his abiding interests not only in the poetry, but in the philosophy and history of that great span of time labeled “Classic.” For all the poet’s many faults as both a man and as a writer, I don’t think he’s attempting anything so gauche as a “commentary (read satire) on our times.” For in fits, Meyer sounds downright “hip”, as in the two poems quoted in full below:

Anxious

The future me has a chainsaw
and a telephone bill.

And I think he’s standing
right behind me.

Artistic

Loose on the straightaway
tight in the corner
criminal at the line
nothing left over

But before you know it, he’s gone back to some mishmash of Anglo-Saxon time and what? early Christian gnosis and/or its theophany? you tell me:

Frustrated

Damn the man-heart;
it sighs meaningless with stone
and remains lodged
between each edge of the interior One.
Over here,
a blind pause,
blank as blink
and over there,
the heavy pre-glance
whose absent instant
was the tilted blur.
Later it said what it saw
but what it saw was before.

Indeed, the entire myspace mood repertoire stuffs a medieval fanaticism for abstract taxonomies into glib little emoticons which by their semi-ironic and ultra-ephemeral nature are eminently contemporary. Here today, gone and forgotten tomorrow.

Era-bending anachronicities are not the only inconsistencies which pervade The Current Mood. There is also a conflict between a myspace culture of auto-apotheosis and a poet who is no stranger to self-loathing.

Productive

Certainly there must be something
to read or write
but I hafta insist on a beer first
for, if there’s one production
I cannot stand sober; it’s me.

The poet hardly stops there. Like some parody of rappers’ braggadocio, Meyer again and again brings up his own inadequacies in love, money, and self-control; he goes so far as to mention his bed which is empty --alas -- except -- alas -- for his own alcoholic faux pas. The very slipshod ramshackle flimflam of the book-as-object, with its typos, sloppy photocopy production, and lack of any cover let alone colophon, reinforces the sense of a poet who thinks himself unworthy. And it all begs a question: for indeed, what is the good self-hating artist to do in a culture where one is expected to build a shrine/page to oneself, complete with digital candles and bullet-point hagiographies. When I was a child, my father used to hang Greek Orthodox luminaries of the saints around the house. Now, saints are replaced with self-portraits.

Take the final stanza of Quixotic

Oh well, here I am
stuck here with the self division
and within-body-weirdness
erected first by my penis
and redoubled by my wallet
Broke with a hard-on
and always just hoping
something will be in there
(. . . nam tui poetae
plenus sacculus est aranearum)
b/c it’s just no use
being all literary these days.

Poor, poor Shane Meyer. No, no use at all. Maybe it’s the fundamental incompatibility of the pre-enlightenment philosophy which orders the poet’s thought and the trashy moodscape of disposable emotions in a one-click culture. The incompatibility of an artistic tradition founded upon ethics with a world of congratulatory narcissism. (Amazing how quickly regard for self-esteem gave way to ubiquitous self-worship, and how humility went from virtue to vice.)

It’s almost as if Meyer would rather be writing about anything except himself, but by splendid coincidence of birth is compelled to write about nothing else. He is a kind of anti-Whitman writing a ‘lament of myself’ in a piecemeal mood-by-mood fashion belying the “self division” of -- what do they call it in health class? an unactuated self? Quite different than Walt’s long integrated paean. But inasmuch as Meyer is a modern man, these days it does not cohere. How to achieve an undivided fully realized whole integrated self? In Quixotic, Meyer says castration and a winning lottery ticket can put you well along the path: it’s hard to argue with that.

In any case, in poem after poem we have a poet trying to come to grips with himself, and failing. God forgive me for mentioning The Current Mood in the same sentence as Augustine’s Confessions, and I mean that honestly: God, please forgive me. But, it’s as if Augustine had been born at some future time, and rather than being instructed in the ways of the Christian Church, he was given a smattering of religious and philosophical ideas from all over the world and all throughout time, and then tried to knit it all together in an autobiography so ambiguous the author doesn’t know whether his confessions or worthy of praise or blame.

By way of most merciful conclusion, this reader would like nothing more than to bring Shane Meyer down to size, but much to my chagrin the poet has beaten the critic to the punch. Furthermore, I too suffer from a modern vice, honesty (which only gets in the way of the supreme modern virtue: intelligence, especially vis a vis self-interest). Honesty forbids me from downgrading The Current Mood to being a mere “document.” Yes, The Current Mood is of slight historical interest as a document of a bibliophile errant in the beginning of the post-literate age, but the book is of greater interest (and irrelevance) because of its occasional literary value.