Books
Voice of America
by Hugh Roberts
New Zealand poets set forth for the badlands and the world of a young US soldier in Iraq.
‘Write what you know” must be the hoariest cliché of the creative writing course, and would reduce literature to blogging if taken too literally. Still, there’s a grain of truth in most clichés, and the accomplished series of poems in Cliff Fell’s and Sonja Yelich’s latest collections raise some troubling questions about the kinds of knowledge writers need of their subjects to fight their way to new insights.
Whose mind in the modern world doesn’t contain the American road movie as a procrustean plot? We all know how it works: you travel from sea to shining sea, either winding the centuries forward from the Old East to the New West, ending in the centreless Autopia of LA, or travelling back in time from the anomie of the impersonal freeways to the geometric certainties and bustling humanity of New York’s grid. “We are all Greeks,” said -Shelley, but in today’s world it is perhaps truer to say, “We are all Americans.” Or at least we all grew up in American movies.
Fell’s Beauty of the Badlands devotes its largest section to this well-worn territory. The “badlands” of his title refers most directly to the New Mexico area where the Trinity atom bomb test was held; but all road movies from John Ford’s westerns onward seek an allegory for “America” (and, in turn, for “modernity”) in the harsh beauty of the Southwest. Once you hit a (real) town called Truth or -Consequences, allegory becomes a drug on the market.
There might seem something almost quaintly Cold War-era about centring a portrait of America around the A (not even the H, let alone the neutron) bomb, but it’s as well to remember that we still live in a nuclear age, not just one of terrorism, torture, extraordinary rendition and IEDs. But if Fell has found new insights into the world’s “badlands” by returning to this familiar territory, they don’t come through in this collection.
Instead, we get all the familiar road trip moments: The Highway Blues (“Fuses and fires and a very fast car”), Poem of a Waitress in Winslow, Arizona (“her fingers brush against the window glass/where the highway never sleeps”), Interstate Blues (“Shreds of rubber tread,/the thousands of blown-out tyres”) and, in In Truth or Consequences, the inevitable encounter with a gen-u-ine Local Lunatic who raves about Roswell and the aliens while, in the distance, the mythic space of the Old West looms: “Old Turtle Mountain showed in silhouette/ – where Billy the Kid holed up for days/out on the edge of Dead Man’s Journey – ”.
If the trip’s familiar, though, Fell’s an interesting companion. His poems have a curious way of wrong-footing the reader, stretching for the Big Image at one moment (“roots that twist into forms of grief”) and falling into the flatly quotidian the next. Lines tease at traditional metrical regularity (the iambic pentameter of “his fingertips gripped tighter on my arm” or anapestic tetrameter of “his wife like a shadow appeared at his side”), but generally revert to free verse. It’s a language that suits the road-movie subject matter, where the poet’s attention is at once diffuse and intensely punctual.
Yelich’s Get Some takes on the Iraq War with a tour de force evocation of one soldier’s road to the battle-field. Yelich wants to root Edgar, her antihero, in a whole cultural world, one of violent TV programmes (Starsky and Hutch, The Sopranos), films (Black Hawk Down) and video games (Halo 3 and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider), to frame the Iraq War as the natural product of a culture hooked on hyperviolence.
Poor, dumb Edgar, obsessed with personal hygiene (a nod, perhaps, to Dr Strangelove’s General Ripper as well as the more obvious figure of Pontius Pilate), violent and inarticulate, stumbles toward a war that he does not even hope to understand.
Yelich’s poems are live-wire, darting explorations of moments and memories, fragmentary scenes where we are seldom given enough information to know what exactly is going on and who the players are: “We were born of the same Mom. We ate the same./He did hand-me-downs. And my feet had toes longer./We watched the same re-runs. And TV on DVD had/better picture quality. I had an edge on him &/right from the start when we would hunt & fish/he was the one who shot things to 20 bits.” (In the Beginning)
That “20 bits” nicely captures the quirky flavour of a real idiom. But is it? The problem I have with these poems is that they are themselves something like a video game. One is expertly conveyed into an impressive simulacrum of a world; but not, necessarily, a real one. How can Edgar have had “back issues of all The Sopranos” (1999-2007) when he was a kid and now be old enough to go off to Iraq? Who says “back issues” of a TV series anyway? Is “get some” really marine slang for “go get some kill”? If Edgar was 15 when Halo3 came out (in late 2007), he’d be 17 at best right now. Just where in America are these kids -growing up anyway (South? Northeast? Midwest?)?
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