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by Kate Rose?
Reading Mr. Brautigan's latest, I'm struck by the fact that "the thirty-five-year-old San Francisco author of Trout Fishing in America, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster and In Watermelon Sugar" (as Dell bills him) cannot be aspiring to poetdom as it is commonly conceived these days.
Brautigan's poems suggest his presence as an imaginative, sensitive, and unexceptional observer. However, they neither explore his personality nor offer a reader anything else on a very deep or elaborate scale. The poetry is not tense, not particularly noble, not, seemingly, aspiring to anything other than the presentation of somebody's reactions, clarified and reduced into tasteful bites. A simpler way of saying this is that Rommel Drives on Deep Into Egypt should be gulped, like a session of Laugh In, that Mr. Brautigan is attempting to be an entertainer rather than a Great Figure in Literature, and that from anybody's point of view the attempt is worth having around. After all, his emphasis on entertainment is his distinction; attempts at presenting the thoughts of a plain man have been around since Catullus.
How, then, are we to be entertained? As entertainer Brautigan downplays himself and needs good jokes, which, short and strung together through the book, hit a response say, seven times out of ten. The material has a fresh touch, is clearly presented, and is delivered as a series of one-time tries. The effect he seems to be after is sensibility-tweaking. He presents a world which is comfortable, if pleasingly strange, and which will carry a reader along with very little effort. This makes him a good guest-room poet, if you like, but he does manage to tweak enough to make the show come off, one way or another. (And how much can be said of other poetry?)
For me, he's at his best when his lines go beyond quipping, though the quips are often deft, considering the relaxed, colloquial sound he wants to use: "Clad in garments like a silver disease / you parade around the house. You're quite happy. / The lights are out. The shades are down. / It's your business." The poem-quips are lighter usually, as in "Critical Can Opener" ("There is something wrong / with this poem. Can you / find it"), though some are serious - briefly - and some fall flat. The best lines in the book are the opening four of a longer poem, "Professional, Non-offensive, Bland":
The gunman holds the wind
in his hand.
Autumn and spring pass like robberies
across his eyes.
in his hand.
Autumn and spring pass like robberies
across his eyes.
The gunman is, at first glance, gentle, almost poetic, but he's also ominously still for a man who "holds the wind / in his hand," and for all his connection with natural events he has no interest in nature. To him the seasons are "robberies" — nothing so overt as murders — which suggests still more disquieting questions. Where is the gunman during the robberies? What is his actual power? Enclosed in a sense that one understands the figure, such questions are the lines' strength: they make the gunman clear but strikingly menacing.
The bad lines of the book are easier to describe. They are either overelaborate and "inventive" or talk at the reader, and so do not hold the pathos-simplicity pitch Brautigan so often makes. An example of the first is archetypical: "The alarm-colored shadow of a frightened ant / wants to make friends with you, learn all about / your childhood, cry together, come live with / you." For weal or woe the poem is pitched on the first line, and the first line is terrible, as — for their baby talk are the two lines that follow those quoted in "Professional, Non-offensive, Bland" continuing to describe the gunman in terms of seasons:
He doesn't blink while one stops leaves
and the other starts them.
and the other starts them.
Sometimes I just can't see his images, and given the pace of the book, am unwilling to stop for them, as with "Chosen by beauty to be a handmaiden of the stars, / she passes like a silver brush / across the lens of a telescope." (Others may like that — for me it's too pretty and vague even for a beginning.)
Ideas, tough, involving ideas, are not Brautigan's specialty. He tends toward gestures and insights and words; but anyone who's been afraid of poetry because of its formality, glumness, bookish references, obscure, private visions, long words or politics can read this book. The man is not writing to poets or his educated peers; he may be writing instant culture, but he will be read.
Minnesota Review? 10(3-4) 1970
Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
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