BRAD BUCHANAN—THE MIRACLE SHIRKER

Brad Buchanan reciting a poem to one of his favorite hand puppets

Brad Buchanan’s reading at The Art Foundry in Sacramento was like going to see the old school poets as they assembled around a campfire and recited their earnest renderings of the world long into the evening. One almost expects a harmonica to (as Buchanan himself writes in "A Personal History of the Harmonica") appear in the wings as a "voice as fragile and eager as a flame."

While I wouldn’t characterize Buchanan’s voice as fragile, his baritone is steady and deeply attuned to metrics as he reads. Each poem is recited from memory (nearly two dozen from his repertoire by my count), and the timing of each line is very measured, if not the modulation of voice. Yet, this works to his benefit. By the end of the evening, one feels mesmerized, pulled into the solemnity of Buchanan’s world. Like Segovia lulling animals to sleep in Seville, Buchanan's poems transfix their listeners and introduce them deeper and deeper into the miasma of human emotion. He is calm and earnest, so calm my five-year-old fell into blissful sleep on my lap.

Coupled with this calm, though, is great intensity. There is nothing breezy at all about Buchanan or his work. During his reading, an intensity comes over him that suggests a game of chess with him would be no ordinary one. His lines are the definition of "muscular," loaded as they are with rich adjectives and "heavy" concepts. For his ambition to take on weightiness so earnestly, I admire his work in that it runs so contrary to current fashion. Buchanan’s soul is very old, and he has no problem in returning to the ponderous ground of the old masters and oral tradition. The poems in The Miracle Shirker are object studies in how to construct a line as a mighty fortress ripe for memory.



Buchanan writes primarily out of his own life experience in The Miracle Shirker. The early part of the book documents aspects of his life growing up in Ottawa. Then he addresses his formative years in the States. Several poems in the middle take on literary and aesthetic subject matter (as well as a smattering of politics). Finally, the last poem of the book returns to the childhood game of tag with a childhood acquaintance who was a cancer patient.

It

Sometimes our games of tag made room
for a cancer amputee named Jamie;
he dangled from one armpit and swung
a crutch, too late, at the fleeting boys
who went near enough to the “home free” zone.

Still, we took our lumps; there was no cast to sign,
so we let the rubber tip of his aim
leave its mark on us as we darted in
and out of range, as though we were drawn
by the vectors of healthy momentum.

He was having fun, we were convinced
as we ran past, pushed each other close.
Bald beneath his baseball cap,
he whirled in pursuit of a shifting home plate.

Too sick to be anything but "it"
in a swarm of playmates he couldn’t infect,
he hit out with one hand at the life
that eluded him, laying the wood on
too hard and too seldom.

Buchanan is best when he is using his precision language to compress action. In this piece we are led through innocently cruel actions of the speaker and his friends until the last three lines when Buchanan lays his punch onto his readers by commiserating with all who have suffered indignity and have been unable to find retribution often enough.

But Buchanan is not one to deliver lines such as the final one above too seldom. On the contrary, there are many dense and muscular lines that must be carefully unpacked. At the outset of “His Wardrobe,”

The vagrant angels of his wardrobe
are prone and prostrate, shapeless cuckolds,
frames of skin that, uncollected,
slump in wrinkled attitudes.

This line and the next make for a complicated and finely wrought image:

They are spread out like pelts let slip in traps:
a feather-filled parka, fallen, faceless
hood-space down, is humped like a monk
uncloistered, wintering in that basement.

The piece continues with various ruminations on the kind of body and the various manifestations of the body’s spirit that resided in this wardrobe. At the end the speaker emerges to speak to these various manifestations that he "want(s) no part of them,/ they’ve made room already; his nakedness/in all but name has been proven/unfaithful, the soul’s cloak, a sham."

Emptiness, failure and death linger in many of Buchanan's offerings. One would presume he would be in possession of a shattered life instead of a Ph.D. from Stanford (perhaps this was the crucial catalyst for such despair). But emptiness, failure and death are really impostors in Buchanan’s work. All of these are really foils for what concerns Buchanan the most—emotional loss. There is grief and near-grief on every page. His world is a world where sperm turns to dust and old men fish and shift foot to foot while they watch their other lives wash away. Buchanan has trained his focus on how consequence and the choices that one makes conspire to cut off one's other lives. This is the root of Buchanan's emotional loss, the loss of possibility.

There are so many other taut and demanding lines that I could continue my discussion of them indefinitely. One line that catches my attention in "Picking Fruit," a poem that neatly approaches the subject of how we choose our mates, is a line that is kind of an ars poetica. In the poem the speaker is instructed by his/her mate to pick ripe fruit. The speaker recognizes that the fruit can’t be put back after it is plucked from the tree, ready in its urge to rot. Towards the end of the poem, the speaker’s I appears to reveal:

I might do worse,
when I write this poem,
than to take your advice
as I look for an ending—
and stretch the thought
till it breaks, or not,
at which point I will choose
other fruit to take home.

While the parallel to the picking of fruit is obvious, and the "picking" of one's mate is the subtext, one might venture that there is more of a literal rendering of Buchanan’s poetics here. The intensity that Buchanan musters to forge his lines (at times because of the slant rhymes he employs) almost causes there to be a shear force for the meaning of his line. It’s a kind of semantic contortioning that occurs. This might almost make him seem like a "LANGUAGE" poet, a notion which Buchanan would be horrified by or find as outright absurd. [Let it be clear that Buchanan makes no bones about his disdain for incomprehensibility elsewhere in the book.] However, in the lines above, one can peer at an attitude of indifference about whether the thought a line delivers remains intact on first impact with the reader.

More of Buchanan’s approach to writing can be seen in "Not If I See You First." I shouldn’t really claim that this piece addresses his approach to writing. It is more indicative of his approach to seeing and telling, so much a part of any poet's toolbox. Buchanan is not very well-ensconced in the first thought-best thought school.

Not If I See You First

My eyes and ears,
you give notice that light
is moon-colored this evening—
the wet wind has stopped
and clouds are no object.

You tell me: look up
and listen for more specific
directions, as if we could fly
to where your observations
originate.

What you describe

makes a second sight
more intense and more lasting
than my own impressions.

Reality tells me you’re what
I can trust. You make time
for the senses to take, unrehearsed.

One day I’ll wake up
and get a taste of unmediated
experience—a sunrise
that signifies, undiscussed—
but only if I don’t see you first.

In this poem Buchanan lauds the double take, raising it to the sanctified ground of the impression. Spontaneity is cashed in for a Rilke-like deep look at things. His eyes and ears intone that it is this kind of hard, rigorous looking that should be trusted, not the facile glance. In this manner, the second take, the experience mediated by rumination is championed. This is a hard thing to get used to when one is informed by mainstream contemporary poetics to get the mind out of the way and just provide unmediated experience. Buchanan knows better. He realizes that the human mind can contribute to a rendered scene. He is most honest about the way his mind intercedes between seeing and telling. In this way he is not just a run-of-the-mill poet of experience. Mercifully, the mind is at work, and it is given acknowledgment for what it contributes to experience. One might say he is a minimalist in tone and style, but a maximalist in the breadth of what his thinking life offers.

Another refreshing thing about Buchanan’s take on the role of the mind in poetry is that he doesn’t want to make very many apologies for the mind being overwhelmed or tripped up by all the input in a highly mediated culture. Buchanan's mind insists that it is still fashionable, if not good manners, to use that mind to make sense.

There are several ringers in the book. "After the Victory Declaration" poignantly deals with the absurdity and inhumanity of war. “The Heroin Garden” is a meditation on drug addiction and, by extension, all kinds of addiction. Other poems from the collection include: A Photograph from Northern Iraq and The Separate Sleep. My favorite poem in the book at current reading, though, is

A Japanese Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park

An Eden of juxtapositions
a litte dark-haired girl feeding pigeons
on the lawn, mimicking a parent’s
too-predictably generous hand,
is given a hasty peck and drops
her peaceful bounty, creating a mob.
A dwarf bonsai by a waterfall
is a parable of serenity; a plaque
offers her a more grave consolation:
"In 1942 the Hagiwari
family was relocated to a different part
of the country." One cannot live
in a garden unmindful of wars,
which are bound to happen.
Golden carp polish themselves in a pond,
like tarnished suns in a captive sky;
crayfish stick together in a muddy corner,
wondering why they were ever set free.
Tea is served in prophetic cups;
fortune cookies gobbled between sips.
These fragments prove the beauty
of a long-suffering imperative:
cultivate your life for strangers
to see themselves in, whoever they are.
When you’re gone a reflection remains,
clean but haunted, a clue to the nature
of paradise: an ancient banishment reinvented.

"Golden carp polish themselves in a pond,/like tarnished suns in a captive sky" alone is worth the price of admission, and the last line is indicative of the kind of loss that determines Buchanan’s world view—even among the small pleasantries of the observable world, one has a feeling that one has been banished into paradise, that some other world holds even more promise.

Buchanan is not a school of quietude poet, a poet who makes the mind disappear because it is some embarrassing toilet paper sticking to the bottom of the shoe. Yet his mind’s adventures do not take him down the path of numerous younger poets who want to explore the noise and confusion of the mind as the new and proper agenda for the mind swamped in a heavily mediated culture. While no one can deny that the mind today is too frequently overwhelmed and therefore seen as a kind of sickly child that constantly throws up on itself, this is not an excuse to openly indulge in this version of the mind to the exclusion of all other versions. And this way of writing, championing discontinuity, is hardly new. I thought I saw all this discontinuity many years prior as the harbinger of the new, and with Zukovsky and others before that. The tricks of discontinuity have grown old and tiresome, even annoying when they insist themselves so adamantly. Buchanan’s work may just be proof that intelligence need not always go beyond the brink and embrace chaos.