Graham Foust. Terminations. Chicago: Flood Editions, 2023. 76 pages.




“You don’t get the sentences you don’t make / back,” a line from Graham Foust’s latest collection Terminations [2023], is as good a sales pitch for the activity of poetry as anything cooked up by the MFA industry and the wider publishing ecosystem, whose high priests often like to square the writer’s “purpose” with professional missions, brand campaigns, and group causes—all of it dressed in the familiar moral fierceness of our age. Forget all that churn for a moment, because to read a poet like Foust—someone accustomed to, as he puts it in a new poem, “working on a scene / with a monkey”—is to return, time and time again, to the sly devices of the English sentence, those mischievous loopholes in language that trick the tongue and entice the ear in a labor that makes the reader sound it out for themselves.

More than 20 years after the publication of his debut collection As in Every Deafness [2003], Foust is chiseling quietly on, as Terminations attests. For all the comparisons to Wallace Stevens over the years, Foust is still, as it were, flying somewhat under the radar—a fact mirrored by the wryly effacing but discreetly determined quality of his poetry. In his new work, the poem is like an anechoic chamber, in which the reader becomes aware of silence’s magnifying presence (“It’s your head and mine / against the hush,” he writes in “Anechoic Chamber”), an ongoing riff on Stevens’ “Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is” (9).

Or perhaps the Foust poem is like a roadside memorial to what Jack Spicer describes in “Imaginary Elegies” as all of “What we have lost or never thought,” with the odd Ashbery note—“just paper / blown out some tower window,” Foust says in “Genre Poem” (53). Having largely eschewed confession, the generating force in Foust’s poetry sits closer to Spicer’s theory of dictation via radio waves than the wholly self-expressive impulse Spicer spurned in his contemporaries—what he called “the big lie of the personal.” The sprinkling of personal detail in Terminations (from the “you’s” addressed to past lovers; the occasional suspiciously quasi-biographical throwback to grad school shenanigans, as in “Smarts”; to the gorily anecdotal and exactly remembered, as when a “Dorito-sized chunk of glass” lodged itself “in Abby’s arm” in “Dialectical Image”) confirms that Foust wasn’t wholly swallowed up by the Language poets despite coming of age under their spell (13). Foust’s poems read slightly more “spoken” than “made,” more confessed than channeled, departing from William Carlos Williams, Spicer, and—for that matter—Stevens.

As part of a cohort of minimalists whose eldest practitioner is Rae Armantrout (an adjacent voice, in terms of composition, might also include Nate Klug), Foust often gives the reader concision at the cost of flow. The longer the poem—and his poems have trended longer over the time—the greater the risk of getting gummed up in the syntactic trickery: multi-clausal constructions, breathless when the poems are longest, delivered in the double and triple negative, as has been trademark of his litotic sensibility. The resulting convolutions read, at times, so bullet-riddled as to frequently return the reader to a prior line—or force a restart of the poem altogether. Foust is always casting a side-glance at the muse (“What do you mean I don’t have / to just feel that I’m here?”), and so the poems often read as if the poet, groggy with feeling, just “backed … into surface or syntax,” as Foust says in the book’s title poem (3, 62). He can get carried away with such obliqueness, and these moments can frustrate. But when Foust succeeds, as he often does, the reader embraces the task toward orderly epiphany, as in “Buddy Holly on Shuffle All Day:”

Like floating, unapplied paint

pain’s not for anything yet,

and I don’t know, I don’t know

that I don’t want extra…

But it’s like you always almost say

while charging at me changed toward me:

You don’t get the sentences you don’t make

back, and that’s like losing a glass-

filled, cobalt-doped sapphire—

you know, that—or like lacking

a syllable somewhere, despite

your never having been one certain word. (7)

Here, it’s hard not to see the influence of Laura Riding, whose own poetic practice found expression in language’s breaches, where paradox and linguistic negation are offered up as pleasure’s kindling. The early Riding, like Foust, was fond of the double-negative, a rhetorical device that helps set up the poem as if an argument constructed from a logic born of both reason and the poet’s imaginative “word-use,” as Riding puts it—procedures no doubt reminiscent of the English metaphysical poets. Poetic negation, as a grammatical and dictive decision, thus becomes aesthetically significant when thinking about both poets. Indeed, the affinity between them is striking. Here are some lines from Riding’s “The Troubles of a Book:”

The trouble of a book is first to be

No thoughts to nobody,

Then to lie as long unwritten

As it will lie unread,

[….]

The trouble of a book is secondly

To keep awake and ready

And listening like an innkeeper,

Wishing, not wishing for a guest,

Torn between hope of no rest

And hope of rest… [1]

Like the innkeeper in Riding’s poem who is “torn between hope of no rest / And hope of rest,” Foust, too, acknowledges the absurdity of the writer’s task (“Doubled, it’s nothing / but an edge that I can keep / on going over,” he says in “Now and Then”); but he takes refuge in a less fatalistic endeavoring, where uncertainty can, through words, breed hope and vigilance (I don’t know / that I don’t want extra… (51)). For Foust, the poem never quite “fails,” as it had for Riding, who would later go on to renounce poetry; instead, it retains a kind of practical ambivalence, letting the poet maneuver through consciousness’ craggy terrain all the while avoiding the slippery taxonomies of figurative encounter: “Reality’s insistence that the real / is mostly missing’s only boring / if you think of it as meaningful,” Foust says in “Poem for Brian Young” (40).

Another thing going for him is precisely this ability to, as the poet Dora Malech puts it, writing about what she calls “positive negation,” “imagine an alternate reality” or “see the world more clearly.” [2] Such clarity, for Foust, has meant foregrounding the panoptic crud of life, the stuff “missed”—or not fully grasped—in the act of living (“Life stays mostly quiet in its blindspots,” he says, in a previous collection Time Down to Mind [2015]). Foust’s orientation—the intensity of any moment; a weathering of doldrums with guileful anticipation—naturally tilts toward future possibilities. So these unarrived flotillas of meaning (whatever pain ends up being for; whatever does, eventually, get written down) herald a future that feels less stuffed with the foreseeable consequences of our collective moment (war, climate catastrophe, etc.) and more, Foust says, like “a tucked-away, test fiction” (12). There are echoes here of Rilke, who writes of the future as “time’s excuse to frighten us;” as “too vast / a project, too large a morsel / for the heart’s mouth.” [3]

To get to the mood of Foust—one consistent across his oeuvre—is to import Rilke’s standing “in wonder” at the “great unbounded realm,” strip it of lyric intensity and make it domestic, “suburban.” A note of sublime terror lives on in the poems, even as it re-emerges, as a previous reviewer suggests, as something like “postmodern malaise.” [4] Rilke’s angels turned Sunday scaries, that low-grade anxiety that follows the poet as he returns “a just-washed glass to the cabinet,” “aware that in fifteen minutes” he’ll drink from it again (16). Tonally, you get eerie serenity and serene eeriness, like Jim Morrison’s vocals in Apocalypse Now—a disquiet baked into both disposition and craft that makes possible such lines as: “Stuff is time, time stuff, the feelgood ruthless,” Foust says in “Off the Beach” (67).

“The future is real, but the past is all made up,” Logan Roy says midway through the second season of the HBO hit series Succession. To which Foust might respond: “So you’re saying that if / we turn back, the path / becomes a labyrinth?” The more language is angled to stare into the abyss from whence it came, the more is said and, in turn, remembered—however imperfectly. In a statement that accompanies the publication of his poem “Dialectical Image,” Foust quotes Walter Benjamin: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” [5] The neat and tidy whole remains out of reach; life is retrieved, if we’re lucky, in glimpses and oddments. “Memory’s fitful and-so-on,” Foust says (11). The rest eludes: “Stuff is time, time stuff.”








Notes

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[1] Riding, Laura, “The Troubles of a Book,” republished by Poetry Nation Review. https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=7936

[2] Malech, Dora, “Positive Negation: Saying No in Poetry,” The Kenyon Review (April 24, 2017). https://kenyonreview.org/2017/04/positive-negation-saying-no-poetry/

[3] Rilke, Rainer, “The Future,” Best Poems Encyclopedia. https://www.best-poems.net/rainer_maria_rilke/the_future.html

[4] Kempf, Christopher, [Review of book Time Down to Mind, by Graham Foust], The Colorado Review. https://coloradoreview.colostate.edu/reviews/time-down-to-mind/

[5] Foust, Graham, “Dialectical Image,” Poetry Society of America. https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/in-their-own-words/graham-foust-on-dialectical-image