Review: 'The Incentive of the Maggot' by Ron Slate

Shifty, and Serious
The Incentive of the Maggot, by Ron Slate

It is difficult to write about home, or at least to write well about home. The difficulty is in vision, I think, which becomes goggled by a nostalgic or angst-ridden lens that both distorts and strengthens memory’s power over the eye. It becomes hard to get an honest picture of a place. Even with the distance of middle-age, it is almost impossibly difficult; unless you abscond, as Joyce famously did, or remain long enough to really become part of the place, as might be true of Frost. And yet — the degree to which poems about home succeed might be relative to how much the poem is not about home at all.

With that in mind — and with all the curiosity of a fellow product of Quincy, Massachusetts — I turned first to the middle of Ron Slate’s debut collection, to his piece on our mutual rearing-ground, “Granite City.” The poem begins with a montage-scene of impressions: “House of my parents, ambulances / sped by with three blocks to go,” the smokestack blinking “like a boy / agape at his first car crash.” Although the images don’t exactly detail a vivid landscape, they set the tone well enough to move with ease into a narrative too general not to be read as archetypal. The moment of transition from scene-setting to story is one of Slate’s poetic gifts,

“Terraces of granite rose from the sea.
On the heights each watery quarry had a name
and a legend, atomic creatures, gangland
graves, a kid who dived and disappeared in 1959
but died in Quang Tin from a Punji spike.

When we got to the quarry, our towels rolled, the police
were taking names. Someone was missing.”

The first image has a dangerous grandeur to it — one would think these quarries were the Cliffs
of Moher (they’re not). It is precise but vague, logical but not immediate. The following lines set the historical note; a common device in this collection, as we’ll see. The stanza is redeemed by Slate’s “kid who dived and disappeared,” which has a verbal quality that keeps these lines grounded in a real world, and tempers what could have been poem-killing melodrama. It brings those first lines under the shadow of suburban myth, revises them in retrospect, and by the last two lines we are back in the mundane tragedy narrated in the remainder of the poem. There are shades of Lowell here, in the history and myth-in-the-mundane of suburban New England life. The poem closes with the narrative of a missing girl, presumed drowned in the quarry, mixed with the local flavor of cultural stereotypes and historical fact — a fair poem, but labored, and never entirely successful.

But a topic such as home, whose focus remains squarely on just one area, is slightly unusual for Slate. The first section of his collection examines, loosely, the exchange between the personal, national, and international, with poems such as “Writing Off Argentina,” “Belgium,” “Small Talk in Munich,” and “Astride the Meridian.” Slate has a knack for the deadpan line, sometimes serious, sometimes not: “A spiteless city without consolation,” and “In the literature of the last days / there are many typos.” The first section of his collection makes the best use of a device, which, for its direct and factual presentation, could otherwise feel unnaturally grim, or conversely, hilarious. What is remarkable in this first set of poems, though, is the easy transitions between joke and anecdote, recollection, history, and reflection. The poems are never frantic, and nowhere do the shifts in tone seem arbitrary. They are carefully plotted, like an O Henry tale. Consider these stanzas from “Small Talk in Munich”:

“My father said find out
if his bombardier was any good.
The bombs tumbled to the spot
where I lay in a hotel bed in distress
with fever, nausea, indigestion.

Two bottles of water were delivered.
Leave them by the door.
But you must sign this receipt, sir.
Thus I signed, marking
the end of the twentieth century.”

Slate moves from bombardiers to food poisoning to the comic formality of the waiter with a swiftness that recalls Frank O’Hara in its dry humor. However, Slate’s poems are seriously and soberly engaged with their topics. His humor and easy transitions are qualities that emphasize this engagement, humanizing outsized concepts such as the destruction of a city, or nation-state and world peace, whereas O’Hara’s entertaining street-life poems rarely amount to more than amusement. These lines from “Writing Off Argentina” exhibit that same deadpan effect:

“Borges asked, What man has never felt
that he has lost something infinite?

When the economy falls apart, you feel that loss,
plus your pesos deflate to illustrate.”

There is none of this in his poem about Quincy, to its detriment. The collection’s second section — which includes “Granite City” — is concerned almost exclusively with identity and family, and feels overwhelmingly autobiographical at times. As in the first section, poems such as “They Called Me” and “When I Returned” have that balance of serious topic with wit and humor, but even in these the humor only emphasizes how personal the poems are already, providing an overabundance of introspection. The deadpan wit is less disarming here. However, certain poems invoke impersonal tones as a counterbalance to nostalgia or reflection. “Essential Tremor,” for example, deals with a resignation particular to those who have been slighted by the sweep of history. There is a reoccurring voice of fact and diagnosis.

“my grandfather stood in the crowd, in 1942,
watching Germans and gendarmes
lift his furniture into a truck and drive away.
For years he scoffed at their bad taste.”

It is the distance of the narrative voice that allows for the humor. In the poem, a tremor of the speaker’s hand symbolizes a link between the generations, and the narrative recalls the injustices of the Second World War, until “my grandfather, exasperated, conceded / ‘There’s no restitution. It’s finished.’” The resignation of the grandfather transforms later into the cynicism of the mother:

“My daughter examined her hands.
My cousin said, ‘We call it essential tremor.’

My mother’s medications made her shake.
When John Kennedy was killed,
she interrupted my whimpering to say,
‘Now you understand what they do to people.’”

Slate hits just the right tone here, between his whimpering and her gloating elder cynicism, drawing all kinds of unspoken commentary about the Kennedy generation. The medical note that precedes this stanza connects the shaking of the speaker to his daughter, and then to his mother, and then to that resignation that is particular to the bitter old. Because of the poem’s use of cliché historical detail, it is not among Slate’s best, but it shows how well he weaves the biographical and the impersonally historical.

The final section delves entirely into the moral life: the images here become analogies instead of metaphors; the narratives become fables instead of myths. The title poem, for example, considers the human tendency for self-destruction through lenses of alcoholism, torture, and war, by considering the maggots that stave off gangrene. The verse is workmanlike and static, staying in one register of awe although it moves through several short thematically-linked narratives. The poem exists in pure reflection, as “praise for this moment of pause,” but fails because Slate’s best are the poems that slip through tones and registers. His particular style does not lend itself to morbid intensity or pinpoint concentration.

In “One Firefly,” the image of a single firefly is used to consider the wonder of conjugal love, all its confusion and the risk of not finding it. It is a didactic poem, again, staid in that moral tone, until the last lines, when etymologists “ask us to reflect / that the firefly is not a true fly. It is a beetle.” It could be a punch line, not unlike the earlier grandfather scoffing at the Nazi’s bad taste, but the rest of the poem doesn’t lead into this humor and so it carries, instead, an air of affected wonderment.

In the introduction to the collection, Robert Pinsky calls these poems “muscular, ironic, informed,” and he is right to point out these traits. When Slate hits upon them in just the right balance and mixture, as he does in most of the early poems and the later ones mostly in parts, they are serious, intellectual, and memorable, if not exactly quotable. This isn’t a groundbreaking work in any sense, and the verse often lack what might be called musicality in favor of dramatic effects, but it is overall an accomplished collection of verse. It is also one of those rarest beasts: a book of serious poetry that is, often, also very enjoyable reading.