There’s a clever-cleverness in contemporary American poetry that keeps alive older verse traditions, straddles generations, and seems very much a boy thing—Frederick Seidel, Paul Muldoon, Michael Robbins, and Adam Fitzgerald come quickly to mind. But my money’s on Anthony Madrid. He’s no one-trick pony; his talent is a dark horse he trains bareback in moonlight. He keeps close company with the Ancients.
In 2012 Madrid’s first book, I Am Your Slave Now Do As I Say (Canarium Books), joined an impressive company of debuts, one that included Robbins, Eduardo Corral, and Patricia Lockwood. His was a stunner, a book comprised of sixty-five ghazals that, by turns, adhere to some basics of the classical Persian form and utterly thwart any expectation of pedantically fulfilling it. The poems dazzle and boggle with their allusive range, crazy metaphors, bold outrageous associative leaps, and rhetorical flair—they’re wired, fired, decked out, gone, and not waiting for you to catch up. More than anything, I was stunned by the energy, effortlessly on tap, of a poet breaking out behind the persona of “Madrud,” his invented Persian alter ego, who made us think again about the meaning of the phrase “command performance”—only he was both player and prince. The ghazal had presented Madrid with the formal opportunities to say anything and everything; the inherent internal autonomy of the ghazal’s couplets, together with the elements (for Madrid) of occasional refrain and occasional rhyme, created the perfect tension between free agency and patterned expectation, disjunction and conjunction, mad clowning around and lightly-worn erudition.
The ghazal is a leaping kind of poem just as the sonnet likes to make arguments: each has generic elements and conventions—specific formal technologies—that poets use in order to do certain kinds of things. A poet can take great delight in repurposing them, but they also provide a tradition of voicings to adapt, bend, distort, and play around with. While the ghazal’s couplets were, for Madrid, a perfect form of implied logic with loose parameters, I heard him exhausting its potentials as he practiced it. What would he do next?
What he hit on is the Welsh englyn, a formally complicated stanza that requires a much tighter coil than the ghazal, but which also intensifies Madrid’s love of propulsion. Madrid only ever takes what he needs from a tradition. In the case of the Welsh englyn, which is also a tradition of variations, Madrid’s own take on it, or his take from it, perfectly suits: a formal elastic tension, like a rubber band stretched back from your thumb and aimed at your best friend’s face. Here are the opening verses to “Stepping Crow,” an example of Madrid’s variation on the tercet form of the englyn stanza:
Stepping crow. Moon at half mast.
Dawn horse, horse, blanket and mule.
The fool knows something you don’t.
Stepping crow. Both feet in the boat.
Books stacked up, and nowhere to store ‘em.
Decorum is spontaneous order.
Stepping crow. Gone north of the Border.
Magic in motion and magic at rest.
Only divest, no need to announce it.
Stepping crow. Locked in from the outset.
Feet in the boat and we’re already rowing.
I don’t like thinking, I like already knowing.
With so much happening at the level of pure form, the technical aspects would be tedious to parse. But if you think of the way Celtic designs carry curving lines from one quadrant of the visual field to another while maintaining qualities of symmetry and balanced value, tracing exquisitely detailed involutions and mandala-like circularities, then you’ll have some sense of Madrid’s analogous acoustic embroideries. Consider, for example, that the final sound in a tercet’s second line rhymes with one of the opening sounds in the third line, and the final sound in the third line of a tercet end-rhymes with the first line of the next one. Except where it doesn’t; except where the poet feints in one direction and then delivers in another. If he drops the ball over there, he retrieves it over here—but it never stops bouncing, it’s in continual play, so you hardly notice what’s happening. Additionally, with the set repetition of the opening phrase in each tercet, and the division of the first and second line into two grammatical parts by way of caesura, Madrid maxes out his opportunities for different kinds of conjunction and disjunction: the second phrase of each tercet’s first line sounds like it’s elaborating on the repeated first phrase, but it’s not always clear how; the second line seems like it’s adding objects and ideas to the picture; and the third seems to extend to a kind of meta-comment on everything that’s preceded, sometimes on the act of poetry itself. But, again, there’s a leap; the logical connection is implied, not stated.
What holds it together? Two essential elements of poetry that, when in balanced interplay, generate much of the pleasure that we take in the art: energy and rule. Energy, in Madrid’s poems, comes from disjunction, the leap in logic; but it also comes from rhythm, which, in these poems, is predominantly anapestic (da-da-DAH)—that galloping sound. Rule, in his poems, comes from rhyme and measure, but rhyme is not only a quality of rule; it also generates something like cognitive energy by holding ideationally unrelated things in suspended acoustic relation. Madrid understands that energy and rule are qualities best exercised in tension, and he’s become a master at it. The poems move like tight syllogisms, but they speak in rapid tongues. The rhymes of these poems, and their rhythms—common to light verse, satire, and some balladry—would be cloying were they running under sentimentalities, received notions, automatic feelings, or other notional comforts. But Madrid uses such elements to formally stage something fresh, a poetic intelligence making new moves and new shapes while keeping audible the verbal history of these deeper sounds.
It may seem as if I’m explaining how a joke works. Such explanations, however entertaining to poetry nerds, are never very funny to the crowd—and Madrid’s new poems have a lot in common with the way jokes work. But the key to Madrid is his obsession with rhyme, its sounds and its logic. Much more than a technical matter, much more than the correspondence between like and unlike sounds, rhyme is its own circuit in the pleasure center of the brain, and Madrid feels how the poetry mind is wired to it. He’s composing out of his own pleasure center, and his aim is to light up yours. It’s not an expression of a formalism; his poems don’t establish positions we associate with poetics these days. And they want to do more than just swing. “Only divest, no need to announce it.” “Decorum is spontaneous order.” “You close the circuit, find out what it’s worth.” “I know it, but I don’t know it.” “Functioning bronze is expected to sparkle.” “If you say it’s obvious, it’s never.” “I wish it were true that the best is best cheap / But the best is better expensive.” These are all final moves in stanzas from different poems, and indicate an important aspect of Madrid’s ambition: he’s not just joking around, he’s interpreting his experience, coming to conclusions, and finding surprising forms of expression for his ideas.
Here are the opening verses to “Mixed-Up Moon,” an example of Madrid’s variation on the englyn quatrain:
Mixed-up moon. Prop open the book.
Now and forever, you nip it in the bud.
I allow the heart does not make the blood,
Nor the human being the book.
Mixed-up moon. I don’t have to look.
Que no quiero ver that talked-up perfection.
It’s no use trying to rub out your reflection
From a piece of polished brass.
Mixed-up moon. I’ll take that as a yes.
I’ll take it ouside, out of ‘shot of the mourners.
I think you’ll agree it’s time we cut corners. We’ll cut
So many corners, the thing becomes a sphere.
Mixed-up moon. Insincere, insincere.
Thomas à Kempis and Francis Xavier.
The Better Book says that good behavior
Is the privilege, not the duty, of the good.
As with the tercet, there’s plotted internal rhyming and rhyming across the stanza boundary, but the quatrains also contain a rhyming couplet in the middle. This correspondence, this central drawing together, throws into greater relief the contrast with the stanza’s last line, which is consistently a kind of wild veering into prose. The effect is brightly comical, as the third line, in verse, runs into the prose of line four; the cross-stanza end rhyme steadies it with a kind of acoustic ballast. It’s like watching a great clown balletically perform a fall that, rather than ending a physical movement, tumbles upward into a new part of the dance.
Madrid appears to have brought together two kinds of poetry that could never have been combined without him (no one before him has been insane enough to try): limericks and wisdom literature. It’s as if the poet of the Ramayana wrote like Edward Lear (another of Madrid’s passions). I cannot think of anything weirder. But it’s fetching as all get out. It puts him squarely in the cultural moment of recombinant originality.
I hear disguised personal material in the poems, such as Madrid’s recent move to Texas; and inside jokes, such as his editor, Nick Twemlow, showing up in a line as Count Dracula; or the buried allusion to Stevens (“Nor the human being the book”). Key final lines of stanzas in one poem float over to perform the same role in another poem. This works in the same way as what stand-up comics call a tagline: when they bring back a joke from an earlier bit, but in a new narrative context. Audiences love it because it disrupts the assumption that each joke is its own isolated discrete form, and helps create a highly artificial world that also feels natural—after all, aspects of our lives bleed into each other.
This wide-ranging allusiveness and self-referentiality builds in the penultimate poem (“Poor little poem, nobody likes you,” says the poet), and culminates in the title poem, saved for last, which opens so winningly:
Last thing in the book. I trembled and shook.
A half hour down and a half hour do.
Sapphire, sapphire, I don’t know who,—
And when will I ever do that again?
Try never. Try this is the end. This is
The thing they don’t know about magic. It’s
Just not in its nature to work every time;
If it worked every time, it’d be physics.
And he’s right, it doesn’t work every time. If there’s a dud here, it’s the long prose lines of “Maxim 2,” which can’t counteract how the earworms of his englyns, in thirty-eight pages of anapestic rhyming, have naturalized our hearing—I find it impossible to make the shift. But little matter. And whether or not we want to hold him to it—never again!—or beg him to stop, Madrid is a few steps ahead of us, saying goodbye to all that: his first book of poetry, his doctoral dissertation, and even, we think, the book we’re reading:
Yeah, try never. The charm’s wound up.
The top of the tree is the end of the climb.
Now Do What I Say and The Warrant for Rhyme
Have done what they could and, one last time,
I say to you all, in a whisper: Try never.
This last poem, self-reflective and self-reflexive, is like a grand finale, where all the prosodic pyrotechnics on display in the book come to a heady climax; your brain feels a little bit like what happens to it when you watch the final scene of Spamalot or Blazing Saddles. But just as it makes its ultimate moves, which are very big, the poem brings the voice down to a whisper. That’s consummate showmanship of a kind we rarely encounter anymore in today’s poetry. It’s serious business, and all play.
September 2017
This review was published in Issue 61:1.