Man Years
by Sandra Doller

Reviewed by Robert Whitehead

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Published: December 12, 2011

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W. K. Wimsatt, the New Formalist critic, opened his famous essay, “What to Say About a Poem,” with an assumption Sandra Doller’s newest book of poetry seems positioned directly against. Wimsatt wrote, “At the outset what can we be sure of? Mainly that a poem says or means something, or ought to mean something.” In Man Years, “meaning” is poetry’s predetermined enemy. With a sensibility influenced by the Language poetries of Rae Armantrout — who writes in praise of Doller’s “pinball wizard” deftness on the book’s back cover — and Charles Bernstein, Doller writes poems as syntactically liberated as they are emotionally arrested, as theoretically serious as they are slap-stick silly. Because the voices and attentions of this book are not of a single, placid mind, there is no point in pursuing a reading of it that would culminate in a single, placid meaning. Doller is a champion of the untidy, of the disorderly universe we would encounter daily if we dared to look hard enough.

Doller’s apparent association with the Language school of poetry is certainly suited to this book-length meditation on disorder and the pitfalls of an implicitly meaning-based language. Indeed, if there is a stand-out issue with the book it is a too-heavy reliance on this association. Formed in the 1970s on the models of the Black Mountain and New York Schools, language poetry involves itself heavily in language theory, making its practice a resolutely polemical one. Borrowing from Structuralist theory, some Language poets assert that meaning resides in the structures of language, not in language’s verisimilitude with Being. Others within the school tend to take a Post-Structuralist approach, claiming that due to the inherent slippages of language meaning is perpetually deferred, and ultimately non-existent. In either reading, responsibility falls away from the poet-as-crafter of meaning, and toward the reader-as-interpreter. This transference often carries a political aspect to it, as a constant juxtaposition of unnatural words, poetic forms, etc. intends to alert the reader to the materialistic nature of the text, to the constructed, artificial nature of “reality.” Suffice to say, it’s a delicate position. When done well, Language poetry can astonish. But less successful language poems – or, perhaps the more successful ones by their own (anti?)aesthetic standards – by prioritizing so adamantly the political aspect of their craft, can feel one-dimensional and banal. While Doller is without question an extremely talented poet with technical skills to spare, her poems can often be found lacking in this sense. This doesn’t, of course, make it bad poetry, but it can, at least to this reader, limit the poems in significant, and important, ways.

The first poem of the bunch, “I Am Not on Earth,” lets the reader know what’s up, which, often, is also what’s down. Doller’s extraterrestrial mind often suspends gravity, with the consequence that her images end up upended and unstoppably mobile. Her simile of a “sentence pinned/ like boxer no gloves” provokes the imperative to “undo all the hitting/ that came before you,” which then invokes sequential images of “dock shots,” “water format,” an “ocean liner,” and a “lake” filled with “fifteen swimmers” of which the poet challenges herself to “prove the trauma of just one.” Doller moves with an uncanny athleticism from one image to the next, often arriving far from where she starts us off. This poem succeeds as a first poem because it readies the reader for this washing sort of puzzlement that’s ahead, for these “waterlike” transformations which blast open new spaces in between the meanings of words. It is clear already on these first two pages that the book is entirely caught up in language’s inability to convey meanings accurately or completely, whether it be human “trauma” or the stable implication of concrete images.

Doller writes from a place of intellectual crisis, but it’s not just another holdover from the Language poets who preceded her. She’s got her own “new crisis,” hilariously “known as the/ MGATGVTTDXOSPDQNOWZA/ crisis” in the poem, “Life by water life by water life by water.com (series).” She is showing us “what it’s like to be in/ the poetry of of,” where “of,” a seemingly static foundational preposition of our language, is found to actually expresses everything and anything: direction, separation, origin, agency, possession. But to express everything is, simultaneously, to express nothing. In problematizing a cornerstone of language, every other linguistic assumption threatens to topple down with it. And indeed, in Doller’s poetry, they do. Addition signs are substituted for “and,” equals signs for “is,” verb conjugations are rarely grammatically correct, and words are winnowed away into other mistaken words.

In Doller’s process the very algorithm of the sentence comes under scrutiny, and while her keen sense of rhythm and play and humor can be delightful, the very rigidity of her theoretical stance can, as I have suggested, limit the poems considerably. “We are all very well—but/ very/ lonely/ without your lexicon,” goes a stanza in the book’s final long poem. Doller’s “heart,” her emotional center, never seems itself involved in the linguistic project undertaken here, and so we gather up what wonder we can and build our own readings with what materials we can salvage — readings often interesting, at times charming, yet, to this reader at least, vacuous and inessential above all. Obscured by so much rigid theory, this is not a book to go back to in moments of profound need— as Doller, interestingly, goes back to the work of Emily Dickinson for her final poem. Doller’s work here points in every direction but inward and, as a result, most of her poems’ amount only to what’s rubbed off with pinball-fast friction from the images she quickly conjures up from the language she insists is failing her. It’s likely she would like this as a complment, and perhaps this is precisely what she was aiming for. But, in terms of human poignancy, the emotion of Man Years is always incidental to the rest.

The only point in the book where we feel moored to some primary emotion is in the poem “Chita Ground.” Not coincidentally, perhaps, this is the only poem where Doller seems to be flirting with “meaning.” Here, we are given “12 miners” trapped in a “blaze” in a “gold mine,” ostensibly in the now-defunct Chita Oblast in Siberian Russia. Given even these few graspable details, the poem’s emotional notes sing clearer and higher than any other poem in the collection.

One miner described

safety

as

O

 

Have breathing devices

have many accidents

have the bosses

have happened

 

Have since been flown

after the blaze unclears

unclear miners flown

down above the ground.

We feel something from this poem— the inherent sorrow of the tragic event, the culpability not only of “[t]he company [that] owns the mine” but of the “not yet unclear” part we all have in a system which necessitates the daily endangerment of 12 human lives for a precious, or perhaps morally (de)base(d), metal. “Accessible” isn’t the right word because it’s still too subtle and well-crafted to grant the reader easy access. The poem works because we can, with effort, locate its workings, and can come in as readers to work beside it. As that contradictory Wimsatt character said somewhere else, poetry is “the vehicle of a metaphor which one boards headless of where it runs, whether cross-town or downtown—just for the ride.” This poem, then, is “rideable.” Doller has all her best qualities on show and, when that happens, who could help but want to saddle up.

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