One thing the 21st Century is really good at is mediating reality. Like how reality in my life can often feel more like representation of actual things that happened, or things I think about happening, or it feels like these things must have already happened. Such a predicament is reality these days. Like reading Maxwell Gontarek’s poem, “Lattice After Your Advice” (from Denver Quarterly) there’s this idea that reality might benefit from an artful treatment. Distort it a little. Whimsical it to the very edge. Consider giving it a splatter of paint, for whatever effect splattering has for art in 2023 (when this poem was published). For Gontarek, there’s even some punning that can be included. The slide from whistling with your mouth to using a slide whistle, and that physical “slide” standing as an approximation of the pleasure “meaning” might afford to art.
I was thinking recently about how Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry overlaps with the argument posed by Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “The Intentional Fallacy.” In both, poems are considered for their imperfection. Meaning, poems reach for an articulation of what had at first inspired them, but every poet ultimately concedes they will never quite accomplish what they’d meant to. It’s a concession that leads Lerner to “hate” poems. And it leads Wimsatt and Beardsley to, I don’t know, critical exhaustion? Either way, reading a poem aware of its imperfect state can only be helpful. For instance, a poem committed to distorting reality (like Gontarek’s) would suffer from too much certainty. Especially that hard edge certainty can exert on poems. Especially where it’s not clear the poet has decided what is certainly a reasonable way to see the world.
And in Gontarek’s case, the poem is better situated as a collection of artful perspectives on the world. And the imaginative or otherworldly character to these perspectives make them uniquely his. Like how Sianne Ngai describes people’s feelings toward their possessions in Our Aesthetic Categories. How what they possess might represent who they are, or the possessions might prompt a person to perform their affection toward them. Ngai goes so far as to compare the relationship of person to cute objects to a guardian towards their child. Translating to a controlling or paternal or even aggressively affectionate.
In Gontarek the possession isn’t so much the objects he keeps in his home, as it is assertions towards the concept of “theme,” though that theme would never be so straightforward as to call itself a theme. Some mental place where the poet can “feel the force of externality within him.” Or where “A word like parole or rapport is the air that goes in and the song that comes out” And, maybe this is a stretch, but I think of these assertions similar to Jonathan Culler’s thoughts on apostrophe in Theory of the Lyric. I’m proposing a congruity between Gontarek’s assertions implying a thematic sense of distorted reality with Culler’s thoughts on poets addressing objects (“O rose,” for instance). In both cases, the poem benefits from its collection of objects / statements. The context that collection might form in conjunction with one another, and how the poet can address themselves to this selection of objects, fashioning themselves. How maybe the self-fashioned poet is easier to believe, then.
Who is Maxwell Gontarek fashioning in “Lattice After Your Advice 2”? Someone who can’t quite figure things out, but who’s willing to keep trying. He is the poet willing to “abandon blue as the mother of green.” To make sense of “art [that] wants to make a sponge for moonlight by stabbing you full of little holes.” Perhaps the point is to unsettle how someone reads the poet. Or to contextualize the poem’s subject in an irregular way, like blobby cute objects feeling so right but only after you’ve let the artist make sense of it for you. Like Marc Swanson’s conflation of disco and deer and all-white department store interior decorating, or Alex Da Corte’s twisted domestic settings under garish, Florida-flavored lighting, or Petra Szilagyi’s cartoonish worship space to the internet. The cute touches a sensibility that could be intentionally shameful or intentionally calloused or just intentionally weird for the sake of unmeaning what is supposed to be meaningful.
It’s a kind of ekphrasis I tried touching on in my reading of Sara Nicholson’s April, where her poem, “The Goatherd and the Saint” presents a frame of mind I wish I could adopt while viewing art. I find Gontarek’s ekphrasis like the performance of an artistic acrobat, who will demonstrate the art, like his writing was itself the body of art. Like the stanza that considers the implications of 46,000,000 grasshoppers converging on Las Vegas. Why not make them a currency. The individual stanzas proposing concepts and then navigating the statement they might be making. But what that localized commentary might say to the reader is the real statement of the poem.
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