Twenty-Five Poems by Humphrey Astley
I have a tumultuous relationship with poetry. You might call it “love/hate,” but that would be too straightforward for such a wily, vexing creature like poetry. Poems, you see, are not easily categorized, particularly in this PoMo world where truly anything goes, and conversations are overheard in which stupid university students remark “Oh, I love writing poems, because there are no rules!”
Oh, you simpleton, there are ALWAYS rules. Though they may have been made to be broken, they certainly exist. Clearly, you are another victim of moral (and other) relativism, and I would like to politely invite you to leave the room, as a more serious discussion will be starting shortly.
You see, it’s not just a rhyme at the end of each line, dear, it’s metre and rhythm and the manipulation of both sounds and words to create emotion from concrete imagery. It is not merely a vague allusion to “feelings,” as many so-called writers seem to believe. As my one-time CanLit professor Kevin Flynn pointed out to our skeptical class, “You should first ask ‘what is this poem about?’” If you can’t answer that question, the poem is a failure. Perhaps a magnificent failure, if written by Michael Ondaatje, but a failure nonetheless.
Thank the swirling chaos for Humphrey Astley. His poems are elegant, classical, but certainly not the kinds of things we run screaming from in our English Literature classes. He understands the concepts of rhythm and metre and the manipulation of sounds. In Twenty-Five Poems he conjures up lovely images of moonlight and co-eds and perverts, and none of his poems ever dare to wrap onto a second page. They are precisely contained worlds, and no matter how melancholy, they always stress the sentiment that life is somehow beautiful.
Ever self-conscious, he even admits “if you see yourself / in any of this, poetry / can’t help / not even if it wants to”, refusing to subscribe to the theory that poetry is transformative and that literature can save the world. I myself am entirely sick of the people who press this view upon us. Believe it in private if you must, but to thrust it on the reader is something akin to religious proselytizing. It sullies everything, and makes a girl want to turn to televised baseball games for escape. Shudder!
Perhaps my favourite lines are from “30/01/06,” in which the persona states “I want to live by the ocean / and cry ‘hey Poseidon / go fuck yourself” / because he and I would have / an understanding.” They remind me of my first boyfriend, another eccentric Pisces, who at one point told me he felt he’d been chosen to be Poseidon’s triton-bearer. When I asked what he meant by that, he couldn’t explain. A Classics scholar, he couldn’t explain much of anything, unless it involved ancient scribbles from long-dead Greeks, and though most days I think of him as an eccentric fuck-up, the lines reminded me of a time when I was sympathetic towards him, when I could have said I still loved him.
It’s this reflexive rubber hammerhead of memory that makes Astley’s poems so good; they are specific enough to draw you in, but just vague enough to allow your own memories to seep in and create additional layers of meaning.
The sexiest poem? You’ll have to see for yourself, but I believe the lines are from “Born Too Soon,” when the dirty old man telling the story remarks “and I remember triumphantly / how she seemed to like / the taste of my name”. Something in me has thawed, and I think I’ll need a moment alone now. You should buy a copy of Twenty-Five Poems (or download the PDF version for free) and see if any of them do it for you, too.
