The Snake that Swallows Its Own Tail

Frank Bidart is fond of the term "radical given." As he explains in a poem from his most recent collection, Watching the Spring Festival: "Tragedy begins with a radical given . . . [which]—irremediable, inescapable—lays bare the war that is our birthright" (29). In the same poem, "Ulanova At Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle," he elaborates his definition by calling the radical given "the patrimony of the earth," the body you're born into (32). Now with a body of work spread over five books—the last three each featuring one "hour of the night," a long poem and lifetime's opus serially distributed and currently capped by "The Third Hour of the Night" in 2005's Star Dust—Bidart in his new collection shifts his focus from lengthy dramatic monologues to the voice behind the voices he's articulated since Golden State, his 1973 debut. Almost entirely through short lyrics, Watching the Spring Festival examines its radical given, the body of work preceding it, to ask one question: "What should be made of Frank Bidart's poems?" Considering the radical given's irreconcilability, this latest book doesn't bother to offer an answer. Instead, it reaffirms the necessity of unceasing exploration. Watching the Spring Festival counters any doubts one may have about the validity and power of Bidart's poetics and in doing so posits itself not only as an explanatory footnote or companion piece but also as an important exposition of the consciousness behind those poetics. To read Bidart and to get to what he's getting at, this book is invaluable.

As with his previous collections, Watching the Spring Festival develops around a motif. But where Golden State uses as its foundation Bidart's father and The Book of the Body his mother, where Desire looks at its namesake and Star Dust at the act of creation, of making, this latest book finds its center in a symbol embodying self-reflexivity, the ouroboros—the "snake that swallows its own tail," as the poem "Winter Spring Summer Fall" puts it (24). Alternating single lines and couplets in typical Bidart fashion, that poem states:

You believe not in words but in words in

lines, which disdaining the right margin

 

Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space

 

Inside time make the snake made out of

time pulse without cease electric in space

 

Like the invisible seasons (24-25)

That form builds the poem, and with each appearance the single, italicized lines consistently evade any meaning previously attached to them. The repetitions, when considered with the cyclically-assuming title, suggest the motif of the ouroboros pervades a poem like time, always cutting through "invisible seasons" already named as the single lines break up the couplets. The snake even shows up once before its presence in the lines quoted above. Also, "inside time" that which is "made out of time" can be made to "pulse without cease electric in space." Here the poem splits time and space, a reference both to any poem as a temporal act of speech and any poem as printed on the page: an occupant of space, unspoken, timeless. Finally, "Winter Spring Summer Fall" argues "a poem is the vision of a process," and in this context, states the book's rationale (25). As the ouroboros is unconcerned with anything outside itself and focused instead on a constant self-consumption and rebirth, "ceaseless motion in edgeless space," so too does "Winter Spring Summer Fall," and each poem in Watching the Spring Festival, build itself out of its radical given.

Fortunately, this book is not content with merely stating its internal logic. The title poem, which appears late in the collection, stands as a revision of "Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake," the book's second poem, indebted to the Chinese poet's "Ballad of Lovely Women." In Bidart's text, Tu Fu reports the movements of the imperial court, "the emperor's mistress, her sisters, the first minister," during the spring festival (4). He begins, "Intricate to celebrate still-delicate / raw spring, peacocks in passement of gold // thread," and continues through other details: "bandeaux of kingfisher-feather // jewelry," "rhinoceros-horn / chopsticks," "fresh / delicacies from the imperial kitchens" (4-6). He remarks on how the emperor's mistress, "Empress / now in all but name," is surrounded by her sisters, "Duchesses dignified by imperial // favor with the names of states that once had / power" (5-6). Notably, in the poem's second section, the temporal perspective shifts.

                                             Three springs from this

 

spring, the arrogance of the new first minister

will arouse such hatred and fury even the frightened

 

emperor must accede to his execution. As bitterly to

hers. She will be carried on a palanquin of

 

plain wood to a Buddhist chapel

deep in a wood and strangled. (5)

The festival in question does not unfold as the poem unfolds. Rather, the festival has already happened. What began, at least for the speaker, as reportage of events as they occur becomes recollection of an event already completed. This sly transition joins the speaker with the reader, both then looking back on something from the past. With that union, the second section makes the poem's final couplet, "Beware: success has made him / incurious, not less dangerous," much more ambiguous (7). Tu Fu's warning could be for the reader as well as for any of the poem's characters. Likewise, the "him" referenced, because the poem is written in the guise of a persona, suddenly becomes tenuous, applicable as much to one of the author's previous personae as to the speaker largely present throughout the current book.

"Watching the Spring Festival" further complicates Tu Fu's warning, by title alone recalling the earlier poem but by rhetorical posture shrugging it off. With the exception of the repeated line "We have been present at a great abundance," the title poem offers little to invoke the Tu Fu version (44). Purely by a spare wink at that earlier poem, "Watching the Spring Festival" suggests the possibility that Tu Fu's warning is groundless, hardly worth acknowledgment; it opens, "In my dream all I need to do is bend / my head, and you well up beneath me" (44). The current speaker's voice—articulated through simple syntax and lack of any distinctly rendered image—abolishes any remembrance of Tu Fu. Only by means of juxtaposition do the two otherwise divergent poems manage any commerce, yet by those means the book is able to exhibit and embody the ouroboros haunting it.

"Until my mouth touched the artful / cunning of glass / I was not poor," the speaker of the title poem says, coiling upon the other poems in the book to reach and attempt to consume the Tu Fu version (44). What matters here is that a mouth is touching glass, as the voice of this book assumed Tu Fu's voice, one spoken through a layer as through glass, as the majority of Bidart's major poem's take on the voices of others. What also matters here is that the mouth, in trying to reach the other side of the glass, wants to consume what's beyond the glass, as the title poem struggles to eat the Tu Fu version offered earlier to create a new poem, one built out of what preceded it. That said, the speaker of "Watching the Spring Festival" accepts his poverty only after realizing he can't get past the glass, and his poverty is simple: He can see the other side and try to get to it, but he can only make himself out of it, never remake it. With the two poems, this recent collection, with surprising felicity, manifests the action of the very ouroboros touted in "Winter Spring Summer Fall," the title poem taking as its radical given the Tu Fu version.

To the reader familiar with Bidart's previous books, the self-reflexivity in relation to earlier work makes itself known throughout Watching the Spring Festival, though by no means banally. The above-mentioned "Ulanova" poem, a description both of the ballet Giselle and Ulanova's rendering of it for film, clearly recalls "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky" from The Sacrifice. In both, ballet and an individual's particular dance serve as subjects, but in contrast to "Nijinsky" the speaker in the verse sections of "Ulanova" witnesses and does not create the dance. Whereas the prose sections serving as counterpoint in "Ulanova" present a speaker in introspection and considerably distant from his subject—"The poem I've never been able to write has a very tentative title: ‘Ulanova At Forty-Six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle'"—the prose in "Nijinsky" uses the voices of Nijinsky, his wife Romola, and other sources (27). A late section of "Ulanova" also invokes Myrtha, a character from Giselle and a "refugee from Ovid," as such perhaps a sonic nod or indirect allusion to Myrrha, referred to in Desire's "The Second Hour of the Night" as "the least known" from Ovid's Metamorphoses (33).

Similarly, the new book's "Catullus: Id Faciam," a two-line poem—"What I hate I love. Ask the crucified hand that holds / the nail that now is driven into itself, why." (19)—is a direct reworking of "Catullus: Excrucior," which appeared in Desire: "I hate and—love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails / itself, hanging crucified" (8). But while the old version concentrates on the torment or crucifixion, the new version addresses instead the question Catullus poses, "Quare id faciam," loosely, "Why do I do this?" It's worth noting that Bidart has pursued this translation since his second book, which contained "Catullus: Odi et Amo." His persistence seems to insist that the reader attend to Bidart's attempts to remake the already made.

Similarly, "Collector," standing alone as the book's second and final section, directly calls to a line in Bidart's collected poems from 1965 to 1990, In the Western Night. There, "You remain . . ." states a series followed by a command or a request: "Muse, Autodidact, Collector / renew its inmate dedicated to you" (179). In "Collector," however, the speaker is the collector, and the collector is no longer in the same territory as the "muse." Indeed, the poem reads like a gathering of pithy cuttings, the speaker talking to himself. "You cannot tell that it is there / but it is there, falling," the third part begins (54). The fourth, in its entirety: "The curator, who thinks he made his soul / choosing each object that he found he chose, // wants to burn down the museum". The tenth argues, "He no longer arrives even / in dreams. // You learned love is addiction . . ." (57). The poem ultimately concludes, "Tell yourself, again, // what you store are seeds" (58).

All such invocations of earlier work reframe that earlier work in new contexts. It's as if Bidart is trying to flesh out previous moments he felt were lacking in some manner. The collector in "You Remain . . ." becomes an individual, not merely a proper noun. The Catullus poem in Desire gains a sense of self-consciousness in the "Id Faciam" version of this book. Through "Ulanova," the reader gets a backstage view of what went into the "Nijinsky" poem. The allusions function in the same way as the "Spring Festival" versions, but on an amplified scale stretching beyond this book's covers to touch the many poems Bidart has published, this book's radical given. More importantly, the latest poems survive quite well on their own as stunning work. There's something to be won from knowing the earlier poems, but that prize is supplemental, a bonus.

As a Frank Bidart book, Watching the Spring Festival doesn't surprise in its style. The poems exhibit his hallmarks, and, as in Star Dust, they continue to be more comfortable with the left margin while not at all requiring the heavy capitalization that began in The Sacrifice and continued through Desire. Instead, the style seems relaxed, finding its shape on the page through interjections of italics alone. Not that the poems in Watching the Spring Festival want for what can only be considered intense articulations in Bidart's earlier work. "To the Republic," for example, a dream of "a caravan of the dead / start[ing] out again from Gettysburg . . . roll[ing] in outrage across America," makes a very strong statement: "You betray us is blazoned across each chest. / To each eye as they pass: You betray us" (40). Recalling "Curse" in Star Dust, which evidently aimed its eye at those who hijacked the planes on September 11, 2001, this recent poem is certainly political, and like its predecessor, "To the Republic" supplies a calm, excruciating honesty that doesn't need thorough capitalization to realize its prosody.

Bidart's sometimes arthritic syntax, his tendency to wrench into a single sentence several modifying clauses and the occasional parenthetical, appears frequently enough. "Marilyn Monroe," the book's first poem, initiates the unsuspecting reader:

Because the pact beneath ordinary life (If you

give me enough money, you can continue to fuck me—)

 

induces in each person you have ever known

panic and envy before the abyss,

 

what you come from is craziness, what your

mother and her mother come from is

 

craziness, panic of the animal

smelling what you have in store for it. (3)

With Bidart's work, however, the muscles flexed through such assemblies do not distract from the poem in hand. In conjunction with confident enjambment, the syntax works instead to propel the reader through the lines, and short declarative sentences soon temper the baroque constructions, as they do in the next two stanzas from "Marilyn Monroe":

Your father's name, she said, is too

famous not to be hidden.

 

Kicking against the pricks,

she somehow injured her mind. (3)

Two more couplets manage similar sentence structures before the last two lines form a fragment: "Posing in the garden / squinting into the sun" (3). Such variations enable Bidart to achieve a sense of balance and simplify, somehow, the complex. "If See No End In Is" provides the best example. A sestina, title built from the form's end words, the poem says in its fourth stanza:

Familiar spirit, within whose care I grew, within

whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see

by what necessity the double-bind is in the end

the figure for human life, why what we love is

precluded always by something else we love, as if

each no we speak is yes, each yes no. (46)

The title itself is intimidating, and it's easy to get lost in this single sentence's architecture, if not in the accumulation of clauses then in the final line's parallelism of yes and no. But as with the lines in "Marilyn Monroe," Bidart's sestina tempers syntactical gymnastics with declarative sentences. The fifth stanza follows:

The prospect is mixed but elsewhere the forecast is no

better. The eyrie where you perch in

exhaustion has food and is out of the wind, if

cold. You feel old, young, old, young: you scan the sea

for movement, though the promise of sex or food is

the prospect that bewildered you to this end. (47)

Where the fourth stanza stretches for its length, the fifth contracts twice, three times if you count the caesura obtained after "You feel old, young, old, young," that sentence trying to blossom the syntax into something elaborate, a rhetorical movement immediately abandoned in favor of the straight, relatively simple grammatical construction that comes after the colon.

The sestina grants the reader a poet at his finest lyrical fitness. Bidart certainly possesses a terrific sense of what form owes to content, especially because he omits the envoi. The title already manages whatever meaning those absent three lines would yield. In "If See No End In Is," Bidart simply does what the great poets have done. He takes the form and he makes himself out of it. That's not surprising; since 1965, he has been honing his technique, and the poems in Watching the Spring Festival guarantee the edge he's been sharpening.

Read the latest book. Shelve it. That moment in "Ulanova"—"The poem I've never been able to write"—will stick with you because the statement is disingenuous. It implies that Bidart, having finally written the poem, is done. It implies that there aren't other poems he's "never been able to write," that there will be no "Fourth Hour of the Night." But what will also stick you is what he says in a section from "Seduction":

What is it that impels

 

What is it that impels us at least in

imagination

 

What is it that impels us at least in

 

imagination to close with to

interpenetrate flesh that accepts

 

craves interpenetration from

 

us with us

What is it What (17)

It's clear Bidart has no answer, and it's equally clear, if only because those lines abjure punctuation throughout, that he's not done looking for it. Three times in that section he interrupts himself to rephrase the question and specify again the parameters of the search. Twice after the revisions he reverts to the abstract approach initially considered, finally brought to its extreme: "What," unadorned, almost an exasperated exclamation instead of a question. What those lines can't prevent evincing is doubt, as that moment in "Ulanova" can't shirk the lines surrounding it. The speaker in "Seduction" is unsure of himself, of the very question he should ask, and in "Ulanova" he is too sure of himself.

The tactic doesn't seem all that new for Bidart, but it is. For years, he has given his readers confident voices that never question how they came about. This most recent book is a departure, a welcomed evolution. Bidart is tackling a voice that doesn't know what it knows and, more importantly, doesn't even know how it's there or how it should know anything. This is the book of the voice behind the personae, the voice of the face behind the masks, the voice of the "Frank" spoken of in Desire's "Borges and I." Impelled by something to consider its own radical given, unable to name what that something is, Watching the Spring Festival is the book Frank Bidart didn't know how to write, and yet he wrote it.