Contemporary Authors

A Mouth in California
Graham Foust
Flood Editions, 2009
January 14, 2010
Ray McDaniel
1

This book performs one of my favorite miracles, a classic because it’s a repeater, a novelty that never fades: it demonstrates that the impossible (poetry) is also inevitable (poems). Though it seems as if the latter must inevitably result from the former, this isn’t quite true; the relationship between them is more of a reversal. <>, which are composed of lack as much as surfeit. Here, the agent of this haphazard divine comes in a slightly disheveled persona of Graham Foust, who is (in the poem “My Graham Foust”) a presence declared by absences, a shirt stitched from holes:
Gone’s the bite of you he spit. Gone’s
his vague sense of what’s to be done.
Gone’s the dream that likely scraped at him
for more and more and more and gone’s his walk.
Gone’s his crass commiseration. Gone’s
his lack of gauze and ice. Gone’s
his tiny fountain. And gone
is his glutinous light
Gone’s his want-to-need basis. Gone’s his happy
plastic stain. Gone’s his glass wolf, his lazy sperm,
his pack of exactness. Gone’s his played-through lack
of played-through games of pain.
Liberation by abdication: well, okay then. He can’t go on, he’ll go on. The speaker memorializes the ingredients and strategies by which the poem we’re reading won’t be made, though of course without this litany there’s no poem at all. While this poem doesn’t fully represent the style of A Mouth in California (most of the poems are a bit more ad hoc, though Foust does thrown in the occasional sonnet or the like) it does contain something of a mission statement; a missing statement better describes his method and spirit. That “pack of exactness” could easily refer to the precision, or the tonal unity, required by the kinds of poems Foust is disinclined to write. And to often sly effect, this disinclination often masquerades as incapacity. Many of Foust’s poems suggest their more pristine alternatives; it’s as if they are being spoken by a man who is struggling to recite a poem he’s memorized, but cannot perfectly recall. Into the lacunae rush <> perfectly comfortable <>
The irony here, of course, is that this jumble should—both in terms of tone and form—result in chaos, and yet Foust’s poems maintain a weird, wobbly integrity: he’s managed to set a failing ship on a recursive journey, so that he can sail it, sink it, and narrate its pending submergence all at the same time. If the effort’s initially jarring, by the book’s end I was fairly convinced that Foust’s ramshackle structures might be some of the most stable shelters around.
One of the ways to achieve something like this elegant clumsiness is to explicitly turn the poems inside out, but the danger of that strategy is that it preserves the mastery of the speaker, and thus risks a toxic cleverness: see, it’s the poem that’s faulty, but I, the poet, remain unsullied by those deficiencies; its failures announce my success. To his credit, Foust avoids this trap, usually via the application of tiny syntactical choices that destabilize the very possibility of masterful authorship. Tiny things, really, but they make a difference: in this stanza from “The Sun Also Fizzles” consider the lines
I’ve come covered in arena dust,
my mouth’s a sleeve’s end,
meatless.
and those that immediately follow:
I’ve come somewhat up,
and I’m here to lick
the static from the ground.
The parallel structure here certainly prepares the reader for “I’ve come somewhat up, / I’m here to lick / the static from the ground” but that wee little conjunction changes everything, shifts the stanza from obscure grandiosity to the self-parodying bombast of stadium rock. The “and” transforms the gnomic to the comic—I cannot help but hear Jon Bon Jovi intone those lines, though to be fair the modest anglophiliac “somewhat” sets up the joke quite nicely as well.
Some of the poems are so loose, in fact, that they seem more like preambles or postscripts to poems that don’t exist. Take, for example, the truly wonderful “Poem with Fear, As Half-Awakened,” which I want to take the liberty of quoting in its entirety:
See, I might return—the car’s gassed,
the map flat and likely accurate—
to where I’m clear to me to you.
This’d be autumn, let’s say, like late
October, mid-November. By then
the road’ll be choked with leaves
and other ruins, the trees with wind
and smoke and dark (or not).
I’ll make records of these facts,
these other shores. My song’ll be a nail
and yours, a mouthful of mirror.
Seconds before we sing, I’ll be reading
that wading pool’s dismal little slaps
to mean trouble. You’ll punch an animal,
any animal; I’ll touch a small bell;
the moon’ll turn everything lurid.
But what good is said moon
if neither song’ll fit the room?
Come with platitudes, love,
come whatever doesn’t move.
This is a plan for a poem that achieves more than could its execution, and what I mean by “loose” isn’t just the preponderance of contractions usually found in hasty conversation, though the word “moon’ll” alone gladdened my heart. Looseness here refers to a spirit in which almost anything might do, and often does; it’s the exact tonal opposite of the poem that insists these words, in this order, are hard-won and therefore explicitly suited for appreciation that brooks no interruption.
Thus, it intrigues me that some of Foust’s poems are exceptionally tight: for instance, see how in a poem like “Their Early Twenties” the moon recurs quite differently.
Another thirst begun, they had their beer
in cans, in bags; their hands, their feet
in frigid sand; their eardrums—make that
their headaches—sewn with ocean.
They’d never seen a moon so willful,
so scissory, never heard the dark water
rearrange so clumsily.
Despite nods to a more cavalier composition—”they’d” and “scissory”—the maker of this poem is far more resolutely the commander of the act than is the reckless engineer of “Poem with Fear.” That “sewn with ocean” doesn’t abide interference, even from itself.
While I appreciate both poems, the correspondent risk is that once I grow accustomed to the self-limiting scatter of poems like “Poem with Fear,” I grow proportionately suspicious of those poems that strike me as less artful in their disguised artfulness, so that paradoxically the more authoritative Foust becomes, the less I trust him. These from the latter category include good poems, but they don’t operate the way they would in a book less concerned with futility. A poem like “Morality and Temporal Sequence,” which after its one-word sentence of an introductory gambit (“Funny.”) follows swiftly and cleanly to its logical conclusion, creates greater unease than what occurs a few pages later. “Poem for Jack Spicer” begins with a set of pleas for reassurance that are both funny and impossible to gratify:
The more I pull it all to pixels
the more to sleep the radio goes,
right? And to be dead would be to be
modern?
This functions much the way “Funny.” does, by securing a resolutely insecure position at the start, but whereas “Morality” never again reminds us of its logical contingency, very nearly every floating balloon of a “poetical” claim in “Poem for Jack Spicer” comes with its own needle to assist requisite puncturing. Thus, the lines “Its poem’s shape’s itself, / and its waves come off as contagious” are preceded by the sublimely goofy observation that “This ocean, I just assumed it would / look bigger.” Likewise, tucked between “It’s not a thicket if I can’t get / me and whoever else into it—” and “We’re al limited by the plumb line, / that imperative that collapses / in the direction of egg and ash” occurs the salvific “let’s call what I’m on a moon of hurt.” Absent moments like these, the persona Foust has created actually does seem to lapse into perfect recall of the poem in question, and while the results are sometimes impressive in their own right, they leave me wondering where went the dude whose trustworthiness depended upon evidence of his instability. His presence is always an interruption, but familiar with the staccato rhythm of interruption, his absence is even more unnerving.
I don’t know how Foust could avoid this kind of tension, and there’s a way of reading the book that reconciles it to the effect the emblematic poems generate (even if it doesn’t, and can’t, resolve that tension). If I read the book entire as macrocosmic of the technique employed in the poems that best balance “success” and “failure” then I can see how those poems more discrete, more possessed of seamless ease, act as do the lines in individual poems that Foust often strives to undermine as soon as he erects them. But this way of reading works less well for the book than it does for single poems, because Foust seems preoccupied (rightly, smartly, I think) with our ambiguous desire for the pleasures once assumed the province of the lone poem. As many others have noted, the pendulum has begun to swing away from poetry operative wholly at the level of the book, a move that itself marked a certain generational disenchantment with poems as bite-sized universes resplendent with guaranteed but perhaps cheap and certainly suspect pleasures and meanings. Foust knows we can’t go back, even if we wanted to—but many of “us” (a term I invoke with the necessary shudder, as if I were summoning a Lovecraftian anti-god, a divinity plural, singular and unquestionably grotesque) do, and many “us” never left. For those who did, however,<< Foust offers a way forward, half-stride and half-stumble. I don’t think he knows where he’s going, but I wouldn’t want to follow him if he did.>>

A Foustian Bargain
Stephen Ross
Graham Foust
A Mouth in California
Flood Editions, 2009
96 Pages
£10.36
ISBN 978-0981952017

There’s an interesting study waiting to be written on the abuse of catchphrases and commonplaces in contemporary poetry; so many poets have wrung great lines out of them. In the following passage from J.H. Prynne’s early masterpiece, “Sketch for a Financial Theory of the Self,” for instance, we find the spirit of self-help advice torqued into something cuttingly beautiful:
We give the name of
our selves to our needs.
We want what we are.
Here, we encounter a poetic logic not dissimilar from that which governs many of the best poems in Graham Foust’s (b. 1970) fourth collection, A Mouth in California. It is a logic that loves to resolve itself into canny, warped aphorisms about the tragicomedy of human desire. And in Foust’s hands, it’s also apt to resolve itself into something bleak, funny, curt, and self-effacing (the back cover of A Mouth in California refers to Foust’s “unique idiom of tragicomic pratfalls”, his “ballet of falling down”). In his “Poem with Rules and Laws”, one of a dozen poems titled “Poem with [Something],” he conducts some cliché-torquing of his own:
You don’t lust
for what you
want. You lust
for what you
can get.
“We want what we are.” “You lust for what you can get.” We want these to say “you can’t always get what you want”, but we can’t always get what we want, can we? In “Poem with Television”, Foust asks:
What part of
“What part of no
don’t you understand?”
don’t you understand…
Behind this kind of writing lies the understanding—so important for writers over the past century—<>. Emily Dickinson called this telling the truth but telling it slant. Prynne knew it in the late 60s, and Graham Foust knows it today.
Yet Foust is no prophet or poet-philosopher, brilliant craftsman or bard. “Wordsmith” might be closer to the mark, though it’s a touch unfair. His poems hardly ever exceed two pages (not a judgment, just a fact) and have titles like “Poem with Premature Ejaculation” and “Perhaps I Have Not Mentioned That I Am Dismantling a House”. He <> Writers and former English majors will revel in their ability to tease out his references to the likes of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Pierre Reverdy, Jack Spicer, Johnny Knoxville, O.J. Simpson, and “Home on the Range”. And best of all, Foust is subtle:
What Woke Me
Not the minor
quake but
the dissonant
taste
of a paint
chip.
Stephen Ross is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. He is the executive editor at the Oxonian Review.

Book Review

To Anacreon In Heaven and Other Poems
Poetry
By Graham Foust

Reviewed By Andrew Nance

Flood Editions (2013)
128 pages
$15.95
Buy this book

Graham Foust’s new book of poems, To Anacreon In Heaven and Other Poems, is<< both a logical next step and an extreme departure>> for a poet whose previous four books are predominately comprised of short, compact lyrics. Some critics suggest that Foust’s fourth book, when compared with his previous three, is a quite “wordy” collection. But if that is true, then compared with all four of his previous books, To Anacreon is positively garrulous, periphrastic, and even, at times, verbose. Meditation would be too tame a word; instead, it is more appropriate to describe To Anacreon as an exploration—the record of a poet building and breaking boundaries of syntax and sense. While the poems in Foust’s others collections tend to be constructed of short lines with quick, terse line breaks, the poems in this collection are comprised of a series of end-stopped sentences that don’t code as verse (as there are no line breaks at all) and don’t code as discursive prose either (as no “paragraph” in the book contains more than one sentence).
But this fifth book of poems is not without those moments of shrewd concision that are<< the splendid fabric of Foust’s previous work>>. In fact, moments of intense, aphoristic poeticism <> For example, take this early text block (which I hesitate to call a stanza or a paragraph):
Days your voice is the house; days the house is the house;
days it wouldn’t be so wise to state my case—there must be
others.
Like most of Foust’s work, To Anacreon is an intensely palindromic book. And nowhere is this more apparent than in sentences like this one—sentences that nearly form orthodox palindromes in their grammatical structure and sometimes in their meaning. As the poet declares early on in the collection: “Every poem’s a failed palindrome.” This isn’t to suggest that Foust’s work is riddled with palindromes in the literal sense (as one might find in the work of some Conceptualist poets), but rather that Foust’s poems are constantly engaged in an exploration of the structures of language, sense-making, and rhetorical figures. Ultimately, this is to say that Foust’s new work explores the ways in which sense-making itself is an intensely palindromic algebra—one of interdependencies that reach, often simultaneously, both forward and backward. And yet, of course, these poems always “fail” to create orthodox palindromes because, while language is often cyclically self-referential, it is also bound to linear structures, and in the end, to the sequencing of time.
Besides concretely subverting the grammar of a sentence, <>. This is both explained and illustrated by an early nod to the book’s own (re)structural obsessions in “Inhabiter”:
Of all the things of which you’ve never once thought, the
ways in which this child could die and this sentence might
end can’t now be said to be among them.
The previous line in this poem reads, “New hums in this room, new bones;” so if you thought that the meaning of “ways in which this child could die” might be defined via an antecedent, think again. The first part of this sentence—“Of all the things of which you’ve never once thought”—is acutely ambiguous, as it evokes nothing less than anything you’ve never thought. The next part of the poem is, in contrast, acutely precise: “this child could die” (emphasis added). In this way the middle of the sentence proceeds as we might expect: through linear subordination. But then we continue to the last part of the sentence—“[the ways in which] this sentence might end can’t now be said to be among them”—and here, instead of returning to a grammatical C-note by giving the reader the usual structural and tonal comforts, Foust suddenly propels us backward not only by ending on the somewhat vague “them,” but by ultimately only defining what “can’t now be said to be among them” as “the things of which you’ve never thought.” It is in this way that <>
While this kind of structural play is sometimes less overt in Foust’s new poems, the feedback loop is almost always at work grammatically and denotatively. As a result, one frequently feels that the structural arrangement between the subject and object of the sentence is being tinkered with. Take for example this short question in the poem “To Graham Foust on the Morning of his Fortieth Birthday”: “Would you look at you look from your skull?” Like so much of To Anacreon, the grammar of this sentence actively displaces the subject from its usual location and, in turn, confuses it with the object. Here is also an example of a denotative twist: the image itself is a kind of Cubist paradox or impossibility as, of course, a subject cannot look from two places at once, even if she could look at herself in the first place.
In To Anacreon, metapoetic statements occur more often than I can quote. Here are just a few from throughout:
World without anything, dark without stars—and then the
poem, some imagined glass, half full of its own shards….
The poem is the continuation of poetry by other means….
I drag the poem through a heart that would explode in its
own image.
This last statement—the idea of the poem exploding in its own image—is just as apt a characterization of the entire book as any other language taken from the text. This is a book that quite literally sustains itself—it is made of itself; it is poetry made of poetic thinking. Primacy is given to rhetorical movement over fixed images, to relationships over static points of value. And the cumulative effect of this kind of grammatical gymnastics is both a visceral and intellectual out-of-body experience. In fact, much of the pleasure that one derives from reading Foust’s new book is in the feeling of being swung from one eddy to the next. The subject is established, flung from its place, and sometimes, comes to rest somewhere else entirely. The pleasure is visceral. It’s palpable. The air seems to swirl with it. In <>, Foust has expanded beyond himself and his previous work. It is a daring departure that <>

Andrew Nance is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poetry has recently appeared in Linebreak, Petri Press, Turbine, and Narrative. In 2013 he taught poetry at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in New Zealand.

Review #82: ‘To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems’ by Graham Foust
reviews | Saturday, June 7th, 2014

COLDFRONT RATING: four
PUBLISHED BY: Flood Editions, 2013
REVIEW BY: Timothy Liu

This book is made entirely out of monostich sentences, some poems ranging from a single line (“Sonnet”: “I sing as if I’m eating what I’m singing from a knife.”) or two (“Ars Poetica”: “Turn your face away and break a first-floor window. / Turn back and throw its pieces through your open one above.”) to the fifty-page title poem (though all the poems begin halfway down the page which allows for a lot of white space between pages in a signature Quemadura design, thank you Jeff Clark). This book at times is mildly funny, whether aping song lyrics (“You can hurry love and you do.”), turning aphorisms on their heads (“No time like the future save for most of it.”), and playfully parrying/parodying old heroes like Duncan (“Often I am permitted to return a few phone calls from a meadow.”) and Stevens (“Tell me, professor, if you know—what’s the sound of one grown man losing his shit in public?”) and indeed, when wrapping things up, Foust directly asks his imagined readers, “Exactly what have I been heaving past my lips to make you laugh?” I like Foust best when he eschews stand-up gestures (which pale in relation to real stand-up guys like, say, a Louis C K) in favor of more off-the-cuff cultural critiques like this: “The fanny packs and cameras really fucked with the Agnes Martins, but they were completely at home in the room of Philip Gustons, thus making me love Guston all the more.” This kind of attention to the things of this world and to how language confounds itself time and again is what makes me return to Foust’s masterful poems from book to book.
Disclosures: Foust demonstrates quite a command not only over sentences but the use of apostrophe (“S’all evil” “Time’ll tear” “The water’d be”) as well as anaphora (“I tend to . . .” “Oh say . . .” “Example . . .” “Far be it . . .”). Such rhetorical flourishes laced throughout magnify the pleasure of the whole.
Favorites: All of the sentences quoted above and a few more of the following: “There’s a staggering happiness to standing in the yard and wearing someone else’s clothes, the very same happiness to sitting in the bath and taking someone else’s pills.” or “My mother works in a big-box bookstore in a strip mall in the town where I grew up, which means I’m regularly informed when someone with whom I went to high school buys a sexy magazine.” and “You can finally write that letter—‘Dear Mark Rothko: How few light bulbs does it take to change a picture?’”

Language Is Frustrating: A Review of Graham Foust’s "To Anacreon In Heaven And Other Poems"
By Eaghan Davis

Spread the Love

Imagine an alternate universe where poet Allen Ginsberg was interested in women. Those familiar with the real Allen Ginsberg know there‘s a minor and glaring discrepancy with this vision, but we’re talking about an alternate universe. At some point Ginsberg meets poet Sylvia Plath. They have a child. Ginsberg leaves poor Sylvia and moves in with boyfriend, poet Robert Creeley. (Don’t blame him! It was the 50’s. Shit was oppressive!) Ginsberg and Creeley raise said child. This holy, metrically endowed babe could very well be Graham Foust. Foust is the author of five books of poetry and his work has been meet with critical success.His latest book of poetry, To Anacreon In Heaven and Other Poems (Flood Editions 2013) <>
Foust places poet Robert Polito’s quote on literary influence in the book’s preface, “You open your mouth and a tradition dribbles out.” Putting such a quote at the beginning of a book shows an anxiety and distaste for one’s inability to escape poetic influence. In opening a space for this discussion, Foust places his anxiety in tension with his allusions to other poets. Foust gestures to Robert Hayden’s “blueblack” language and nods to Allen Ginsberg in a widely used paratactic long-form. While trying to trace Foust’s influences, one must first examine the poet’s anxiety toward claiming complete ownership of his work.
Foust’s anxiety is not unique, and in many ways, it’s a tired trope of contemporary poetry. The “Anxiety of Influence” or, the burden a poet faces while writing poetry, is in fact well documented. The English Romantic movement articulated concerns about its relationship with literary tradition. T.S. Eliot documented the “modern” poet’s problematic relationship with literary tradition in his 1919 essay “Tradition and Individual Talent;” Yale Professor Harold Bloom further explored the relationship between poet and predecessor in his popular book The Anxiety of Influence. In short, this shit was new well before your Grandma was born.
This phenomenon can be boiled down to an experience illustrated in Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Feb. 29, 1958.” Ginsberg experiences great anxiety from his dreams of T.S Eliot reading and “approving” his poems. (Imagine a father giving his son a gold star for a good report card.) Foust seeks this same approval and yet, he parts from Ginsberg’s sentiments and understands from where his own anxiety stems. Foust dreams about Allen Ginsberg dreaming about T.S Eliot, and in turn, doesn’t become anxious; rather, he puts himself through a frustrating poetic psychoanalysis. He’s keenly aware of the frustrations in attempting to break into an art form where all seems recycled.
There’s something explicitly postmodern about Foust’s poems. The poet seems to check all the right qualification boxes. One of the best examples of this postmodern sensibility is evidenced in Foust’s “Sonnet.”
Like poets Ted Berrigan and Gertrude Stein, Foust breaks the chains of formalist expectations by writing a sonnet that abides by no traditional metric. Berrigan and Stein’s sonnets were interesting because they delved deeply into issues with poetic formalism. Foust’s attempt to comment on the sonnet reinvents the wheel. We’ve seen it before! We get it! The formalistic requirements and pressures of poetry are oppressive! Foust is among many contemporary poets that fall into this reductive form of criticism.
This problematic way of approaching and critiquing poetics can be illustrated easily. Skim through this essay and look for bolded words. These bolded words break all traditional grammatical metrics. These words would melt Strunk and White’s respective faces. As a writer one must ask oneself, other than breaking a traditional form, what else do these bold words represent? Nothing.
The message ends there. “Breaking” language doesn’t fix language’s inadequacies. This “breakage,” in effect, becomes a circular argument.
What Foust’s work may lack in innovative poetic commentary, though, it recovers in new age, coherent, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-esque poetry.
In Dawn Raffel’s cover insert for To Anacreon In Heaven and Other Poems she writes, “Foust has written a gorgeously subversive field guide to the inner life, the poet’s life – an anthem, if you will, to a borderless country, unbound from assumption. Brace yourself for the shock of recognition.” Raffel’s introduction is particularly apt. The shock of recognition is where Foust’s book soars with success. Instead of producing garbled, highly paratactic poems with a stated purpose of showing the inadequacy of language through obfuscation, Foust produces digestible poems that cut between the personal and the abstract. In the same way that John Ashbery is concerned with “Language on a very plain level,” Foust is concerned with overturning assumptions about “plain” language through language games.
Foust’s witticisms infused with personal narrative become a tired project at the end of the book. The reader gets a sense that To Anacreon In Heaven and Other Poems is a book that attempts to be unconventional, and in doing so, becomes what it seeks to discredit. At the end of the book one grows tired of Foust’s game of “surprises” that morph into patterned language. This is not the book’s issue; rather, this tiredness is the book’s chief accomplishment. Foust’s To Anacreon in Heaven And Other Poems becomes a tired project at the end of the day because Foust wants it to become exactly that. The poet wants readers to understand that even a project meant to debunk the habitual and uninspected elements in language eventually becomes habitual too.
Eaghan Davis lives in Ann Arbor, MI. His stories and poems have been published in the Susquehanna Review, The Michigan Daily, Fortnight Literary Press, ZAUM Magazine, the Euonia Review, and Polaris Magazine.

Graham Foust's TO ANACREON IN HEAVEN AND OTHER POEMS
Wed, 03/16/2016 - 12:21pm
Ted Mathys

There is a well-worn creative writing cliché that a writer must “find” her voice. The Internet drips with advice for the aspiring writer looking to do this, some of it reading like self-help lit for those trying to professionalize. In a blog post titled “Find Your Poetic Voice” on the Writer’s Digest website, for example, Laurie Zupan writes: "I realized that what I didn’t have was a clear, working definition of poetic voice. So I set out to find one—with the goal of honing my voice and the hope that...I’d land myself in a graduate program." Books on poetic craft also traffic in this language. W.W. Norton lures beginning writers to Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within with the promise that "chapters on gender, addiction, race and class, metaphor and line invite each individual writer to find and to hone his or her unique voice." This idea even passes the Dead Poets Society test: in the crucial scene in which Keating first invites the boys to stand on his desk and then jump off to see the world differently, he barks at them, “Boys, you must strive to find your own voice! Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all.”
Maybe this cliché is a by-product of the institutionalization of creative writing. Or maybe it springs from the ample well of American self-absorption. But it also provides a crucial backdrop against which to read contemporary poems, because the cliché recalls and reinscribes the Romantic idea that the lyric voice of the speaker is intimately tied to the author’s own perspective. If there seems to be distance between the authentic self and the vocalized or written self, it is only by closing this distance—by “finding” one’s voice and leading it back home—that the poet can fully tap into her potential.
In To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems, Graham Foust doesn’t find his voice; he totally loses it. The voice in these epistolary poems trills and wanders farther and farther away from the writer, addressing dead Greek poets, the muse, the reader, and the self, until a dizzying reflexivity takes over and, as Foust puts it, “My voice goes and loses me.” Anacreon pushes the epistolary mode to its breaking point. The result is a collection that offers an original and superbly slippery model of poetic address.
Foust is preoccupied with the mouth as a lyric instrument that possesses a scary sort of agency. The voice is, in turn, its disembodied sidekick. The mouth and the voice taunt writer, “speaker,” and presumed audience alike. In “To Graham Foust on the Morning of His Fortieth Birthday,” for example, the voice addresses the poet directly: “Who between the two of us deserves to be cursed with having only to do nothing or good? / Allow me to pull that mouth off.” Most epistolary poems have a rhetorical skeleton that can be sussed out with the question, “Who is saying what to whom and from what distance?” With Foust’s poems, though, I find this question nearly impossible to answer adequately. These are not traditional persona poems in which the voice is identifiably thrown, in the way that, say, Evie Shockley ventriloquizes Frederick Douglass in "from The Lost Letters of Frederick Douglass." Nor are they stylized epistles that perform intimate conversation in the presence of a reader, like T.S. Eliot’s poem to his wife, which begins “These are private words addressed to you in public.” Instead, Foust writes poems that address a second-person you, but his recipients are ciphers for the act of poetic utterance itself. In "Ten Notes to the Muse," for example, the speaker gets stuck in an echo chamber with the muse. Foust’s muse seems to be no more than an embodiment of the poet’s inspiration to speak, an externalization of lyric desire, which is to say that the speaker is speaking to speaking. This muse is part prankster and part superego, prodding the poet to elevate the quotidian through a kind of hyper self-surveillance: “I flicked a wasp from my juice glass – you said to write it down.” As these notes to the muse cumulate, the subject and object collapse into each other:
Thanks to me we’re lost in unison.
Thanks to you I can move without meaning to.
If I could I’d sing everything you sing to me to you.
This mode of address is maintained by the poems’ strict reliance on sentences rather than verse lines or lengthier units of prose. Foust exploits the sentence’s capacity to accommodate the one-liner (“There’s nothing sexier than a wounded supermodel leaning on a cane.”) and the aphorism (“I sing as if I’m eating what I’m singing from a knife.”). Letters are written in sentences, of course, but Foust’s sentences mirror his larger feedback loops largely through their formal qualities. In lineated poems, where a sentence often breaks over numerous lines, the poem can generate energy in the interactions between line, syntax, and grammar. But Foust delivers sentences in toto and one at a time, and the reader finds energy in the natural propulsion toward a formal terminus (the period) and toward a recipient (as in the notes to the muse). The poems’ radical use of contractions and syntactical rearrangement, however, slows the sentences down, twists them into pretzels, and enhances Foust’s closed circuit of voice and self: “Wherever I am’s another place on the world from which whoever I could’ve been’s been banished.”
The poems in Anacreon do not travel unidirectional vectors from the poet’s interior life to identifiable external recipients, but neither does their self-reference resolve neatly into Narcissus leaning over the pond, about to go splash. Instead, we encounter a poet singing into the void (of creativity, of self, of other, of history) and follow the voice as it wavers and curves along a boomerang flight pattern, returning to him and to us, made strange: “In the rhythm of these things, I have to stop without saying, remember songs I would’ve had to’ve been said to sing.” The book reminds me of the passage in A Defense of Poetry where Shelley compares the poet to a nightingale and the poet’s readers to people who listen to the bird from afar. The nightingale, Shelley writes, “sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.” Foust’s poems, like the nightingale’s song, are ultimately addressed to a hologram of the self, but as they travel his readers overhear. So for all of its performance on the page of something called “Graham Foust,” the book ultimately participates in a poetic tradition that sees self-annihilation as a route to lyric song: “They’re lowering me into me. / This is where I came in.”
Finally, there’s Anacreon. The title poem, which concludes the book, is a 54-page epistolary romp to this ancient Greek poet. But it’s more importantly an address to the lyric tradition in America. Because of Anacreon’s legendary skill at performing drinking songs, an eighteenth-century gentlemen’s club of amateur musicians in London named their group after him. The Anacreontic Society wrote a theme song praising him, called “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Society meetings featured concerts, puppet shows, and a lengthy supper, after which members, probably good and tanked, sang the theme song. In subsequent years, several other writers adopted the Society’s tune and set their own lyrics to it. One of these writers was Francis Scott Key, who wrote his patriotic poem “In Defense of Fort Henry” with the tune in mind. The combination of Key’s lyrics and the tune of “To Anacreon in Heaven” became “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
<> poem<< gestures toward the incredible fact that our national anthem is a drinking song in praise of poetry that has been warped beyond recognition and is now sung by military officers at football games>> with jets booming overhead. “To Anacreon in Heaven” investigates the resilience of song in the context of an ever-morphing American language bloviated with media chatter and instrumental speech. Sometimes the poet answers absurdity with absurdity, dealing zingers like “Oh say it’s just before brunch in America” and “Good call on the famine.” But more often we find him tying and untying linguistic slipknots: “It’s that time again, time for someone – in this case, you – to hear a poem in which the speaker – in this case, me – makes use of phrases like ‘It’s that time again’ or ‘This is a test’ or ‘This just in.’” Foust yokes together the various language impairments of poetry, nightly news, and emergency broadcast tests, and he dwells in false signification and representational deformities. To Anacreon in Heaven neither pretends to resolve these deformities nor fully yields to them. Rather, <>:
My words aren’t half misguided if they’re music to my teeth.
They’re parts of thought like any others, draped in leisure.
I drag the poem through a heart that would explode in its own image.

Ted Mathys is the author of three books of poetry, Null Set (2015), The Spoils (2009), and Forge (2005), all from Coffee House Press. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Poetry Society of America. He lives in Saint Louis, teaches at Saint Louis University, and co-curates the Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts Poetry Series.
To Anacreon in Heaven and Other Poems
by Graham Foust
Flood Editions, 2013
$15.95 paperback; ISBN: 978-0-9838893-5-9
128 pages

Poem — From the February 2017 issue
Remainers
Ben Lerner

By Graham Foust
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When I read Graham Foust, I’m put in mind of both Wallace Stevens and Johnny Cash. (Foust, who was born in Tennessee, entitled one poem “Nuances of a Theme by Stevens; Or, Why I Love Country Music.”) Like Stevens, <> The challenge, as with Stevens, is to call up “afternoons / that in their moments had meaning” without suffering “a relapse into god-talk.” But <>. “A fed-up blue jay having fled it, / a branch perfects its shake” — <> the wake, <>, <>. “In so many still lifes / the sense that someone was just there / is mostly what is felt.”

It is Foust’s wry, dark, plainspoken lyricism that makes me think of Cash. (Listen to recordings of Foust reading his poems and you’ll hear another reason why I evoke Cash’s baritone.) In “Remainers,” the combination of Foust’s unpredictable syntax and his short, angular lines (usually alternating between six and eight syllables) imparts a kind of musical drama to the phrasing: “songs rush darkly through my insides / as any disease might.” We hear the stagger, the twang, the occasional slurred rhyme.

In an insightful review of A Mouth in California, a collection Foust published in 2009, Ange Mlinko describes how his work partakes of the “collective American imaginary” and vernacular concision of country music, but cuts it with literary influences ranging from Stevens to Susan Howe. Foust’s echoes and borrowings feel less like modernist literary allusion and more like covers, or misremembered lyrics, tracking the daily, demotic ways that language passes through us, only very briefly ours. “Some of what I feel or see / sails out to where it’s heard.”

Even when Foust uses found language, it sounds unmistakably like him. (“Remainers” begins with a line lifted from James Wright’s “Saint Judas.”) In other words, he makes us hear how every voice is a composite of other voices. The most notable instance of this recycling of remainders in “Remainers” is the headline and subhead of a 1919 New York Times article about Einstein’s theory of relativity. The news-speak, now archaically lyrical, appears in its unaltered entirety (I checked). Yet it reads exactly as if Foust had written it, then broken it into lines: “lights all askew in the heavens / Stars Not Where They Seemed.” In the context of the poem, the newspaper clipping is discovered “shoved between / two pages of some tome / about Minnesota plant life.”

I get the sense that after the opening section, the speaker of “Remainers” is no longer Foust but an older person, a woman who addresses him, perhaps from the non-place of a nursing home: “I’ve coughed the halves of Monday’s pills / from the spoon of my hand.” As you’ll see, this person’s speech — or Foust’s imagination of it — blooms into a powerful meditation on how an approaching end “makes living waver.” Under unfixed stars, the poem perfects its shake. —Ben Lerner

https://www.stmarys-ca.edu

1/1/2007: Graham Foust, an assistant professor of English at SMC since 2005, replaced Sindt as the MFA director in September. He is on the MFA steering committee and has written three books of poetry, including Necessary Stranger, which was published in the spring.

10/31/2008... very pleased that other institutions are aware of his terrific work," said Graham Foust, associate professor of English and director of Saint Mary's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program

Gramaphoons

A rock bottom, a bottom line, a body in extremis all make the poems of Graham Foust quaver and reel.
By Ange Mlinko
April 16, 2010

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Cars. Rain. Alcohol. Insomnia. Money. Wind. TV. Sky. Super Target. Bones. Birds. Honky-tonk. The night. A list like this evokes vast tracts of middle America, whose most abiding cultural expression may be the country song. Country is a pure product of both the recording industry and folk music traditions dating back centuries; it typically mines the quotidian and refines it into an elegy you’ve been hearing on the radio all your life. Things of unutterable dreariness–strip malls and interstates but also drinking problems, marital problems–turn mournfully sweet. Its roots in America’s dream life are chronicled in Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic (reissued as The Old, Weird America), which tells the story of how the earliest recordings of "race" and "hillbilly" music (which became blues and country, respectively), gathered and released by Harry Smith in 1952 on Anthology of American Folk Music, ignited the 1960s folk music revival and revolutionized rock music. The story has mythic dimensions, but Marcus also gives it a civic cast: this is music as "democratic speech."

Graham Foust was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and has lived as an adult in western New York, Iowa and Oakland. His poetry partakes of this collective American imaginary and its terse vernacular style:
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Graham Foust

Full of noise and lust, they fled
the city for the shore. It was four
in the upcoming morning. Everyone
slobbered; somebody drove.
Another thirst begun, they had their beer
in cans in bags; their hands, their feet
in frigid sand; their eardrums–make that
their headaches–sewn with ocean.
They’d never seen a moon so willful,
so scissory, never heard the dark water
rearrange so clumsily. Crowded future,
dingy beach. They scratched the air;
they burned and buried things.
They were the fruit they couldn’t reach.

This poem, "Their Early Twenties," is from Foust’s new book, A Mouth in California, and it bears some earmarks of country (and rock) lyrics: drinking, driving and longing. It’s also made of fourteen lines and rhymes faster than its loose tetrameter lawfully permits. (Even a loose meter, the poem shows us, functions exactly as the speed limit rhymes want to surpass.) Fourteen lines, a scumbled final couplet–a sonnet, really. And "sonnet" is just an old word for song.
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As a form, the sonnet is pithy and strict, but compared with the poems in Foust’s previous three books, "Their Early Twenties" is positively wordy. Here’s "Night Train," from his debut book, As in Every Deafness (2003):

creased, the darkness seems
exactly

the same–

someone
in one of those houses

is you

A hundred classic songs–from "I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry" to "Night Moves" to "Helpless" to "In the Early Morning Rain"–haunt this fragment. It’s an ode to American male vagabondage, a manifest destiny of freedom and nostalgia. Freedom to wander the tracks or the roads with a bottle (Night Train is a species of booze only winos and teenagers can stomach); nostalgia for the exile from a house and everything home represents. But the poem doesn’t ramble. It has a peculiarly American (if not Protestant) succinctness, its words like bits of scrap metal scrounged from spaces of intergalactic scarcity.

A Mouth in California is Foust’s fourth book in seven years. His first two books, As in Every Deafness and Leave the Room to Itself,<< featured poems>> (like "Night Train") <> (Or this reader, at least. For me, absence of a range of feeling in a book of poems seems more studied, not less.) Foust’s austerity made him hard to place aesthetically: he had studied at SUNY Buffalo, a haven in the 1980s and ’90s for poets enticed by the poststructural Language school, and his minimalism would have seemed at home there. But there was no radical indeterminacy in the work–his wrenched syntax was constrained by, and put in the service of, an afflicted soul that seemed apprenticed to the poems of Louise Glück more than those of Charles Bernstein. In his third book, Necessary Stranger (2007), Foust <>: for one thing, the volume opened with the trio of poems "1984," "Jump" and "Panama"–all titles of Van Halen hits from the band’s heyday. <> from the pressure of his condensery.

Necessary Stranger also dispensed with the endnotes that had, in Foust’s previous two books, acknowledged borrowings from the likes of Archilochus, Wilco, Cormac McCarthy, Joy Division and Heidegger. By now his readers know the Foust MO: <> The borrowings are almost beside the point; Foust doesn’t so much appropriate sources as embed his poems in the cultural subsoil that nourished him. ("Everything, Earth, compares to you," he quips in A Mouth in California, inverting the title of the hit song "Nothing Compares 2 U," penned by Prince and covered by Sinéad O’Connor.) And in one of my favorite passages, he writes:

To space’s constant swallow comes
a small unslaughter: a song
for once, a sliver. Be let go.

The poem is called "Outbox." In it, what is swallowed is emitted as song, and what sings is also a swallow: the bird. What goes in must come out a mouth in California.

Like many classic country songs, Foust’s lyrics pivot on a moment of reckoning: a rock bottom, a bottom line, a body in extremis. The body is the ground of the poetry, and the body is always pushing up through an extreme intellectual demeanor of the speaker, as in "God":

Keep talking while I tend to the lines on your face.
Keep talking while I touch your face
and keep talking through your face
and throw your face through your face.

Similarly, in "We Arrive As If at a Picture, Pinched,"

I push throat after throat
????through the bones of my ears.

There’s physical violence, of course, in the repetitions of "your face" and "throat after throat." Much of the violence of Foust’s work materializes in the sounds of the poem, in its tough brevity and sudden line breaks. But the violence is bodily too, and psychological, and even for someone like myself, repulsed by melodramatic violence in American movies and fiction, Foust’s work is irresistibly charged. "Poem With Rules and Laws," a poem about marriage, manages to be both ironic and raw:

You don’t lust
for what you
want. You lust
for what you
can get. I’ll
carve you your
hankered-for
chemical
oath. I’ll show
you the badge
in my mouth.

The badge in the mouth of the husband-policeman enforces the primitive vow–the kiss–that sealed the conjugal union. Its function is to take the couple out of long-term anhedonia back to that sacramental moment–and the threat of force backs it up, theatrical or not.

Marriage in A Mouth in California is not a bourgeois gilded cage that prevents circulation in a bountiful sexual market. As in many country-and-western songs, marriage succors against the privations of a world ruled by scarcity, not eros. Scarcity, of course, eventually prevails. The heat of the husband-policeman dissipates: "there’s a wet log moaning in the fire…the old thought jerking like a flame." Cycling back into indifference, the poet remarks, "Lying’s lonely–to lie/alone at least is good." If, in the poems, the speaker’s body is trying to claw out through the mind, "pushing," it also sinks back again into autoerotic solipsism. "I don’t love you/like I love you," he quips. In "Masturbatory," an epigraph from Jonathan Edwards ("And so ‘self-love’ may be taken two ways") announces a poem that ends as follows:

here goes–. What this is
is arousal’s residue, the hands
as hands and someone else.

The "this" is masturbation–or is it poetry? The well-worn joke breaks open a fresh realization of the gesture linking them: the imagining of one’s self as other: the "necessary stranger" (as he put it in his previous book). Sexual abjection similarly becomes an act of self-portraiture in "Poem With Lifestyle":

I want to be beaten

within an inch of my likeness
and/or my liking it.

Foust collapses two senses of the word "like" in order to cleave the word "beaten" in two. Liking something is a quality, and qualities define a self. But this is like having an image of oneself beaten out of a blank material, as in metalwork, and so violence toward the self is once again a vehicle for mirroring, for self-knowledge. (If in "Poem With Rules and Laws" violence relieves the anhedonia of marriage, then more violence might be required to spice up the longest cohabitation: oneself with oneself. "I don’t love you/like I love you.") Since so much of Foust’s work is a declaration of what he likes, embraces and wants to incorporate into his corpus–that is, his body–these poems instruct the reader to become what you like so you can like what you are. And they mark Foust as one of the best erotic poets writing now–one who knows how to wring sex appeal from sly titles and rough enjambments.

The vision of primordial American malehood and its "democratic speech," which Foust’s poems and their country-and-western forebears help to fabricate, has a strain in American fiction too. The first note in Foust’s first book mentions Cormac McCarthy. The opening poem of A Mouth in California, "The Sun Also Fizzles," invokes Ernest Hemingway:

What’s this place, between
geography and evening? The sun
also bludgeons; a car has three wheels;
and what’s the wrong way to break
that brick of truth back into music?

But to say, contra The Sun Also Rises, that the sun fizzles and that it bludgeons is not just to invoke and then subvert old Papa. It’s to rewrite him in a particular way: a hint is the jarring word "geography" and its being coupled to "evening." The phrase evokes the poetic climate of one of Hemingway’s nemeses, Wallace Stevens.

Key West wasn’t big enough for the both of them. One evening in 1936, fed up with the rumors of the poet (then in his 50s; Hemingway was in his 30s) smearing his name amid their overlapping social circles, the novelist forced a confrontation. In his own telling, Hemingway dodged Stevens’s fist and administered a sound beating. Only when Hemingway paused to take off his glasses did Stevens land a punch, breaking his hand on his rival’s impervious jaw. Stevens spent days convalescing. Hemingway concluded his account of the fight in a letter to Sara Murphy, "Anyway last night Mr. Stevens comes over to make up and we are made up. But on mature reflection I don’t know anybody needed to be hit worse than Mr. S."

It’s a hard image to shake: the Marlboro Man of American letters, creator of a pared-down tensile diction welded to subjects like war and big-game hunting, jabbing at the insurance lawyer from Hartford who cultivated a hothouse vocabulary. Hemingway won the battle in Key West, but Stevens hasn’t lost the war. He is a deeply important influence on many contemporary American poets, including Foust, who argues fiercely with him in A Mouth in California. In "Los Angeles" he addresses the master whose famous poem "Sunday Morning" relinquishes the notion that paradise lies in the next life: it is always here and now. Foust’s riposte:

The only critique
of paradise is paradise.

Be there drinking

The argument continues in "Nuances of a Theme by Stevens; Or, Why I Love Country Music":

These sounds are long in the living of the ear.
The honky-tonk out of the somnolent grasses
Is a memorizing, a trying out, to keep.

What I wanted to say–the wind ripping up
and into everywhere–was "Don’t say nothing."
This was not allowed.

What I said was "Don’t say anything."
This, too, was not allowed–the wind, again,
ripping up and into everywhere.

The truth, I knew it: breath and heaven–one thing.
A thing for shrieky talk and fearless error.
A thing about to happen to anyone.

The first three lines are lifted from Stevens’s "Things of August." The rest of the short poem responds to it and to Stevens’s most durable theme: the fine line between signal and noise, human and inhuman sound, meaning and nonsense–or mere prosody. ("The Idea of Order at Key West" is Stevens’s most perfect expression of this: "It may be that in all her phrases stirred/The grinding water and the gasping wind;/But it was she and not the sea we heard.") Foust zeroes in on Stevens’s use of the word "honky-tonk," with all its connotations as a bastardized music from juke joints in the Deep South.

Of all the charges against Mr. S.–he who deserved "to be hit worse than" anybody–none sticks so much as Robert Frost’s barb that he wrote bric-a-brac; the word "honky-tonk" rattles the august "Things of August" and thus seems at first listen to be bric-a-brac: a word he used just because he liked it, and to add to his menagerie of sounds. Foust, on the other hand, writes as a real aficionado of honky-tonk: the improper double negative "Don’t say nothing," he suggests, is just another way of saying "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is" (the last line of Stevens’s well-known "The Snow Man"). The wind is the surfeit of sound that drowns out the speaker’s signal, or in more democratic parlance "shrieky talk." "A thing about to happen to anyone" is death or cosmic accident, which cares not for social class or diction. So Foust redeems a meaning out of Stevens’s "honky-tonk," and welcomes him into the company of those who "don’t say nothing."

"Nuances of a Theme by Stevens" might be a companion piece to a short essay Foust published in 2005, "Like a Hurricane" (a shout-out to Neil Young), in which he offers an explanation for Stevens’s coinage of the word "gramaphoon" in the poem "The Search for Sound Free From Motion." "Gramaphoon" warps the word "gramophone" to rhyme with "typhoon" (their circular motion rhymes, after all):

Indeed, a record player both repeats endlessly and balances masterfully; by contrast, a poet, constrained by the fixed and rigid world of the written word, needs to wobble a bit, must falter strangely, in order to more truly convey the world in which he or she walks. It seems that poets must also–again, like a hurricane–wreak a little havoc: warping "gramophones" into "gramaphoons," they destroy words and rebuild them in order to get their new and playful worlds to work.

Meanwhile, in A Mouth in California, "Poem Beside Itself" instructs us to "queer every relevant dream." That queering, like the wobble in the gramaphoon, or the honky-tonk in "Things of August," is Stevensian. Kin to Emily Dickinson’s "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant–," it is the necessary complement to the myth of the Hemingwayesque straight talker of democratic speech. There is no truth in straight talk that doesn’t slant, queer or wobble–you can read that wobble as metaphysical or emotional, the voice quavering from heartbreak or the reel of the inebriate.

Dickinson, who called herself an "inebriate of air," has a cameo in A Mouth in California‘s tour de force, a poem called "My Graham Foust." The title alludes to Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, a groundbreaking study of Dickinson’s devastating poem "My Life had stood–a Loaded Gun–." (Howe, Foust’s teacher at SUNY Buffalo, is a dedicatee of this book.) The poem is a riff on Dickinson’s trope of imagining herself after death, but it is also a version of the Grateful Dead song "He’s Gone":

Gone’s his imposter, and gone’s
his gawky cross. Gone’s
his tweaked legacy’s hit list–hooray!–
and gone’s his waste of song.

If Foust can write Wallace Stevens into the country music tradition, who’s to say he can’t write the Grateful Dead into American poetry? Their loping repetitions ("He’s gone, gone, and nothing’s gonna bring him back") are echoed by his loose ballad meter, but the final stanza is a pentimento of literary references:

Gone’s his sister. Gone’s his doctor.
Gone’s his transom. Gone’s his view.
He’s nobody’s autobiography.
Whose are you.

Besides the Grateful Dead and Dickinson, there’s Gertrude Stein (the author of Everybody’s Autobiography) and Alexander Pope ("I am his Highness’ dog at Kew;/Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?"). The echo of Pope glancing off the echo of Stein evokes another Stein line: "I am I because my little dog knows me." Reprising the theme that what one swallows reverses and comes back out of the mouth again, the poem rings with influences high and low, poetic and folk, I and I, nobody, nothing, anybody and everyone. A hit list without fisticuffs.