Fierce Register: The Poetry of Jeffrey Schultz

Fierce Register: The Poetry of Jeffrey Schultz
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“Civil Twilight,” Jeffrey Schultz

Ecco, 2017. 978-0-06-267898

Poetry relishes uncertainty. Gaps in knowing, the numinous, the strange: not only do these often serve as the subjects of poetry, they are the very generative materials from which it stems. Truth, if conceded, even, to exist is tenuous and subject to an intense scrutiny—healthy for both its challenge of, and refusal to, acquiesce to conventional (often specious) notions of knowledge and virtue. The value of this questioning; of uncertainty, if genuine, is that it can birth a poem capable of piercing a reader’s preconceptions just enough to let enter the newly possible light of heightened consciousness. But what if a thing, beyond any shadow of doubt, is known; is truth? What if that truth is as harrowing as a perilously warming climate; a militarized police force; humanity’s perpetual failure to heed its own history? In their urgency, these truths demand a poetic response beyond the realm of epistemological concern. They must be answered with a fierceness and persistence in measure to the apathy and ethical poverty that wrought them. Enter Jeffrey Schultz.

Civil Twilight is Jeffrey Schultz’s second collection of poems and, like his first (What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other), it was selected for the National Poetry Series. That Schultz is one of only four poets ever to be selected twice for the Series begins to give one an idea of his talent. Certainly among the best and most original American poets working today, Schultz’ new collection raises a formidable contention to Yeats’ oft-quoted line that The best lack all conviction... (“The Second Coming”). Rather than succumb to the paralysis of fatalism in an age where apocalypse seems far nearer than in even Yeats’ own, Schultz has opted to employ his compassion and artistic rigor in service to human continuance. This, while facing, unflinchingly, its diminishing prospect. To write this book at all—one that works to expose delusion and flawed ethical precepts toward the end of effecting a revolution in human consciousness—seems the very definition of conviction.

Poet Jeffrey Schultz

Poet Jeffrey Schultz

Civil Twilight consists of 8 long poems, the longest and perhaps most beautiful of which “Resolution in Loving Memory of Sky and Gooseflesh” spans 33 pages. As in his first book, Schultz, too, employs a long line, a device necessary to accommodate the complexity, breadth, and precision of his thought. The length of Schultz’ lines open new dimensions of richness, and extend the possibility of resolution to a micro-level: Whereas the form of God is what stifles and is not spaciousness, not space. Or, His soul like the Sibyl sprawled in her little jar, gasping for air. Read unhindered by breaks, lines like the above gain the feel of poems, complete thoughts, unto themselves.

The size of these poems demonstrate Schultz’ ability to sustain and amplify image and metaphor over vast distances. Nothing uttered is ever forgotten or untended to, and rather than using the semiotic as mere springboard to poetic conclusion, Schultz uses it as conceptual ligature. These poems double as historical and philosophical arguments. They go forth with serious purpose and succeed in offering both aesthetic and intellectual fulfillment. Notice how Schultz evolves an academic depiction of the eye in the following, from “Stare Decisis et Non Quieta Movere” :

If, our irises unflexing, their novae’s bursts succumbing to apertures’

Black, our pupils becoming willing to admit what they might admit,

However insufficient, however insignificant in that scheme of things

We imagine must even now unfold somehow beyond our understanding,

Beyond us, if to look up widening into the night sky and stare at the stars,

Those grains of salt scattered across obsidian, those pale fires,

Those distant repositories of whatever we put there, those whatever,

Is in fact to stare into the past, then to live in the city is to live without

History.

The poem proceeds, over the course of four pages, to ride that initial depiction of the eye into a meditation on wonder, whose consideration stems a reflection on its corporatization, which generates an imagining of the Demiurge (the universal creative force) becoming state-controlled and taking over the advice column in the weekly newspaper and offering the following suggestions:

Don’t be so sentimental!

All that can be thought’s been thought. All that can be felt’s been felt.

Lean against the smooth stone of your countertop and feel the pristine past.

And if that’s not doing it for you, go out and see a film, all listings

Are contained herein. Love culture; give its rosy cheek a kiss. Admit its

Rosy skyline’s beauty. If the smog’s too thick, see a film of your city’s sky.

They clean that stuff up in post-. Try not to raise a fuss. Just be fucking civil.

Civil Twilight wants to show you how severe, if truly considered, the strictures of militarism, capitalism and cultural homogenization are. An exacting thinker, Schultz’ fever-pitch precision in elucidating those things (and their mechanisms) is at times reminiscent of the late David Foster Wallace. Schultz refuses to submit, ever, to vagueness. For vagueness is too often a veil for exploitation and oppression. Civil Twilight implores you to: Look. This, from the title poem, which in part reflects on the 1969 People’s Park protests in Berkeley:

...It was Napoleon III, when he leveled

And rebuilt Paris’s poorest districts, who called them riot-streets:

Long, straight boulevards too wide to barricade and arranged on a grid

So that the beast of the people rising could be contained and attacked

The whole length of its body. Yet it was with no Old World stiffness,

No particular sense of occasion, only instead those peculiarly American

Virtues of efficiency and enterprise which the SWAT team,

Each individual’s blood-type scrawled in permanent marker upon his neck,

Descended the steel grating of their armored transport’s ramp

Single-file and then, in a maneuver choreographed with a textbook

Precision and punctuated by the lobbing of gas grenades,

Expanded to sweep the terrain. Mass eviction and mass arrest.

Another clearing of the land, easy as the bolt-cutter’s blades

Through a padlock’s hardened steel, a gesture natural now after so many

Landing parties, after men on the moon. Descend and fan out

And subdue. ...

Civil Twilight won’t lie to you, and the hope it contains is on a scale reasonable with our demonstrated capacity for radical change. There is, however, a great deal of love here. It is a love manifested in a desperation to communicate. And that communication, Schultz’ beautiful, fierce and knowledgeable poems, act to make more possible the slight chance of our salvation:

...there’s something I want to say to you;

I just don’t know how. But if we had the time to sit with each other,

Eat, if we had time to fill ourselves and the time, together, to dream,

Then—off the record, no photos—I’d like to imagine the moment

We could imagine a moment when the disfigured world did not

Fold back again on itself and into a history which was already its future.

That would be something, at least. Something more than desire’s

Impossibility, or the way Beauty kicks Suffering in the shin,

Tells it to stand up, keep walking, because the Promised Land,

It keeps saying, is just over the next rise.

(”Deleted Scene”)

***Civil Twilight can be purchased here.

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