Review: 'Wild Tongue' by Rebecca Seiferle

The poems in Rebecca Seiferle’s Wild Tongue are emphatically modern. Yet, as I read it, I recalled Wordsworth’s The Prelude — specifically, a passage concerning poetic ambition in which the author wishes his work “might become / a power like one of Nature’s.” Seiferle’s obvious ambition is to create poetry with the force of a storm and to defy the prevailing wisdom of her culture, as Wordsworth did his. In the case of Wordsworth, it was the rationalism of the Enlightenment; in Seiferle’s case, it is the subjugation of the female identity and all that entails. This is immediately clear in the misogynist epigraph from the first letter of the Church father Paul to Timothy: “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection.” Seiferle might just as easily rephrase it to read, “Let the women learn subjugation all in silence.”

It is by this epigraph that we see what binds the collection thematically — and it is against this that Seiferle’s title, Wild Tongue, becomes meaningful. It is, so to speak, the symbol of female identity unleashed. The collection can be read as an argument against the hegemony and patriarchy of western civilization. It is deeply modern, and yet somehow not: the project itself implies a certain moral imperative that harkens back to a nineteenth century liberal tradition, the dream of a perfectible society. The poetry itself, however, could not be further removed from that age.

Seiferle’s aesthetic sensibility and range exhibit an amalgamation of influences, and a brief gloss of the authors reflected in her poetry — John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, John Donne — gives some idea of the remarkable breadth of verse forms in the collection, from brief lyrics such as “Those Greek Warriors” to sprawling project-poems like “On the Island of Bones.” But she is not only using these various aesthetic sensibilities and formal devices to exhibit her postmodern erudition: the poems of Wild Tongue are never pastiche. Lines such as, “I’m slightly disturbed when my friend writes / that guilt made her take my books to bed, not / because I’m unmindful of the erotic / life of the word,” from “Thieves of Fire,” recall any number of post-confessional lyricists such as Billy Collins; but “I just want her to be the snake in my bed,” from the same poem, is all Seiferle. She is able to identify and successfully exploit the strengths of whatever verse form she happens to employ, and there is a willful originality to her adaptations. This willfulness is likely the strongest aspect of the collection, but it is the same quality that, in excess, becomes its greatest vice.

Where other poets often leave moral and social issues open to interpretation (and, in doing so, leave open the conversation), Seiferle is blankly explicit. If a moral can be told, it is often put to verse in no uncertain terms. These poems are, as she writes, “like a pregnancy of meaning laboring to come forth.” They are bursting with revelations, with the constant reminder, in tone, word, or image, that the wisdom of her poetry is, to borrow again from Wordsworth, “something unseen before.” Seiferle assumes a prophetic voice throughout the collection, perhaps to appropriately counter the Western tradition that began with preacher Paul. This is rarely an effective approach to any artistic endeavor, though, since self-righteousness is a poor substitute for craft. It is even less effective when the insights are stale — not unimportant, per se, but the feminist and postmodern insights that Seiferle offers are hardly revolutionary. Our familiarity with her ideas weakens the power of her poems (the actual verse of which is of varying quality), since their dramatic and intellectual effectiveness hinges too often on a reader’s shocked reaction, one that is unlikely to be evoked today.

For all the many influences that are apparent in these pages, the poet who Seiferle most recalls is Denise Levertov; even more so than Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, or their heirs. Take, for example, Seiferle’s poem, “Ancestral Refrain,” which reflects on the way traditions are forged out of convenient half-truths, ignorance, and violence. It takes the form of a personal lyric, a meeting between two peers in the present-tense vein of that popular post-confessional style. The speaker reveals an obscured truth — the fact that General Custer played the bagpipe standard “Garryowen” before each battle with the Native Americans, thereby evoking not nostalgia but a memory of genocide — that illuminates the naiveté of her peer.

However, Seiferle lacks what might be called faith in her reader to “get” what it is she’s doing. The dramatic cues are woefully exaggerated: the speaker has to “choke out” the truth about “the damned song;” there are images of “bayonets flashing” and “cartridge pouches” fashioned from “the vaginas of women.” Both characters are “startled” by the speaker’s “vehemence” in the end, and the speaker recalls that Custer’s counts of “fighting men killed” are only a convenient version of events: “In truth, only 11 could be so classified . . . / the other 92 were women, children, and old men” [author’s italics]. A more controlled selection of details and use of language — one less enamored with shock — could have led this poem to a wonderful cumulative moment where the friend rejects, in willful ignorance, the brutal overtones that the song has now assumed. The dramatic movement of the poem’s plot, so to speak, is correct in that sense, and Seiferle has a fine ability to demonstrate these types of juxtaposition. Instead, though, the gesture of the poem is overwrought; the anger and graphic detail are comic instead of shocking; the essayistic dénouement that closes the poem — “it is the voice of our ancestors — all those war cries; in any language. . . . each not a song of slaughter” — is redundant. The connection has already been made clear, really too clear. The dramatic movement of the poem was completed with the friend’s denial of the ugly past; the reader is there with the poet already. The willful poet imposes her moral will too pedantically in this case, and “Ancestral Refrain” is exemplary of the flaw that undermines Seiferle’s ambitious collection.

It is in her deep flaws, despite Seiferle’s post-romantic tendencies, in which much of Wild Tongue is most reminiscent of Denise Levertov’s anti-war poetry. There is such a preoccupation with the righteousness of their messages that neither poet seems able to focus her technique. The poetic failures of both Levertov and Seiferle have admirable motives — the desire to effect substantively and to better the receptive culture — but the work of both also remains argumentative instead of engaging, due in large part to the myopia that is key to the vision of the poems. They lack something that could be called bravery in some counterintuitive way — each is afraid to be ambiguous, unable to perceive and empathize with anything not aligned with their moral message. They eliminate the moral ambiguity that allows the fullness of humanity to be encountered in verse. Lacking this human element, morality remains purely theoretical.

Without restraint in regards to her didactic tendencies and without the necessary trust that a reader will read through her literal and abstract images, Seiferle often turns to simplistic provocations: the overused word “cunt”; a reactionary anger towards female domestication; and a dictionary of neo-romantic words such as absences, soul, love, and depths, overused in mostly uninteresting ways. It is not that these approaches or techniques are necessarily failed, but in this collection they seem to be misused. They are the choices Seiferle makes when she is otherwise unable to reach some dramatic effect, a failure of her imagination that leads to these deus ex machinae methods.

The poet is at her best when she restrains these tendencies. “Ruined Pastoral” is a remarkable reappraisal of one of the English language’s oldest genres — a difficult undertaking in which Seiferle succeeds admirably. In her poem, the pastoral scene is ruined by the “hantavirus” that would be deadly to the eater of the “amber / seeping out.” This leads to death,

how ancient
the hive was
and how dangerous
in that desert
where lungs could fill
with the waters of
hantavirus —
the sound of nothing
filling the house,
invisible bees and
death in the sweetness —
your finger to
your tongue.

It suggests a tainted modern sexuality in the same way that early pastorals allegorized a perfect love, in which the pathetic fallacy of the natural world mirrors the human inner life. In the early tradition, bees represented the potency of nature; here Seiferle builds and undermines that: the honey-like substance is a harbinger of loss and death. The sweet-looking amber is the rot of an infected mouse. The fatal virus is transmitted from finger to mouth in an erotic image that suggests, subtly, that perhaps there is no pastoral possible in our modern era. This subtle connection between the tradition and the modern merits and encourages re-readings.

“The Fragments of Hölderlin” is a fascinating free-verse piece that seems to document the workings of the mind of Hölderlin as he descends into — or perhaps attempts to resist — madness. The lyric is caught in a circle of reference and mania, moving from snippets of Hölderlin’s verse, to egomaniacal contemplation such as “this room does not exist / except in the house of my / own being.” The poem’s circular logic oddly resembles that of Hölderlin’s teacher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose metaphysical system was denounced time and again by Immanuel Kant, and one wonders if this parallel is intentional. The visual construction of the poem — running across the whole margin of the page, aligned left and then aligned right, at times almost in prose blocks, scattered words and phrases — is a recognizably loose pattern, but that recurring pattern remains varied enough to give the impression of a mind at once obsessive and erratic. In this poem, more than in “Ruined Pastoral,” Seiferle’s didactic tendencies are naturally constrained by the historical nature of her subject.

Similarly, “After John Donne’s ‘The Dreame’” is Seiferle’s most successful post-romantic lyric — perhaps the best-crafted work of the collection. It is a remarkable poem, marked by a formal control — internal off-rhymes and a subtle sense of meter — that is otherwise rare (and, to be fair, would not often be appropriate); but, it is a welcome attention to language after so much flaunting of free verse forms. Her closing formulation of assurance — by a form of love more powerful than identity, which makes the speaker’s identity more real in return — is romantic to its core:

To dwell in some other paradisiacal o you
where, beyond all Feare, Shame, Honor,
one does not wonder if ‘Thou art not thou,’
but to bear the wonder of all being, where I
am I and you are you and love but is and is.

One can hardly help but hear not only Donne here, but, again, Wordsworth: “but in the very world which is the world / of all of us, the place in which, in the end, / we find our happiness, or not at all.” Seiferle’s poem converses with Donne’s original, drawing upon his terms and rhetorical structures but, in the best and most restrained example of her willful reworking, makes them entirely her own. The poem’s logical formulations stand at the edge where poetry only nearly defies understanding, and the poem stands admirably in the tradition of Wallace Stevens and the best work of John Ashbery.

In a case where Seiferle works well outside of a confining tradition, the opening lines of “We Should Have Turned Back” — another post-confessional lyric — are perhaps the most striking and memorable image in the collection:

We should have turned back
on our way to the Marine Fest, at the skeleton
of a child whale making a gate with its bones.

It is a disturbing but ordinary and entirely naturalistic image, like something out of Franz Kafka or Charles Simic. “We should have turned back” is dramatic but touches upon a perfect note of trepidation, and the image of the whale’s bones making a gate is one of an unsettlingly biblical kind. After this opening, however, the poem strays from this effective and evocative style of depiction into another moralistic, prosaic narrative, not entirely dissimilar from “Ancestral Refrain” — still, it remains one of the stronger pieces in the collection.

The reader is briefly shown an otherwise absent sense of humor in “after two years, you say only / the British have a cultural sense of tact which is necessary / to ‘true intimacy,’ and I am not British, so.” This mouthful of a title (which doubles as the poem’s first line as well) lends the rest of the piece a welcome sense of absurdity so that overly-poeticized lines, such as “a pain in you that made you breathless” and “like angels giving birth to laughter,” are funny and exaggerated instead of groan-inducing. If this type of hyperbole is intended to work in a similar way elsewhere in Wild Tongue, it was unapparent or unsuccessfully conveyed, and perhaps this poem should have appeared earlier in the collection to give the whole an edge of absurdist humor.

It is difficult to instill verse with moral sense. Most poets do not even try. Even Seiferle writes, “In absolute statements / poetry perishes,” but she seems not to have heeded her own truism. The outright successes are scarce in Wild Tongue, and more so for the length and ambitions of the collection. Seiferle has a clear vision of what she wants to achieve intellectually, but she is too enamored with it to see that many of her insights are too common to be provocative. She has enough imagination to construct evocative and, at times, effective images, but her sense of tone and control fail her consistently. The collection is notable mostly for its modern engagement with feminism, its variety of free-verse forms, and the continuation of the post-romantic tradition. When that tradition is applied most directly, it seems, Seiferle shines, perhaps because she is limited naturally by the other poet’s work; left to her own devices, willfulness and impatience are her persistent undoing.