CSU Reviews John Beer's The Waste Land

The Waste Land and Other Poems, John Beer's award-winning book of poems, has just been reviewed by Colorado State University's Center for Literary Publishing, with a remark that Beer is concerned with a "joy of caffeinated, revved-up rhetoric." Caffeinated, yes! The reviewer, John Whalen, looks at Beer's many allusions, but keeps Eliot and Ashbery in mind:

Beer’s concerns encompass more than just the dynamics of the poem itself. His language works within wider gestures of allusion (to other poets, pop celebrities, movies, plays, and the corporate-speak of advertising lingo), self-regarding textual references, and the philosophy of language:

I had some undeveloped photographs
With which I planned to establish
The reign of light, ten thousand years
Of light. I couldn’t quite explain

How one and one makes two, it’s
A postulate, nobody’s interested. . . .

(“Speak Yon Undiscovered Towers”)

. . . .The poems repeatedly reference Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets,” as well as the work of John Ashbery, whose bland tonal juxtapositions and sophisticated disengagement are evidenced throughout. Beer’s undeniable intelligence, clairvoyance, and enthusiasm are sometimes coupled with a cynicism that the poem cannot stand on its own. If a narrative is evident, the poem breaks it apart before it comes to fruition, all the while mocking it.

As smart and articulate as Beer proves himself to be line by line, the speaker’s role in these poems is often muted by detachment. Beer embraces an intellectual stance from which he reveals himself only intermittently. The convivial tone he adopts in the ten pages of footnotes read as more genuine (here I think we get Beer’s most natural voice) than the tone of some of the poems themselves. In the notes, he goes so far as to direct the reader to disregard the words in “Lives of the Poets” and replace them with ones he now reveals. A cute move—indicative of a sly insider sharing needed information—but maybe also a self-referential gesture that loops back on itself one too many times.

The moments Beer loses the thread are the same moments he relies too much on reference and derivation. In the poems that work least well, the ones that read more like an explanation of a philosophical stance or an exploration of the idea of a text, Beer seems to work with a critic’s motives: It’s not that this poem is directly communicating my thoughts or experience; it’s that by writing this poem I am writing this poem, or that by writing this poem I am illuminating my take on another writer’s phrasing or subject matter.

You can read some of John Beer's poems here. Or watch Beer read with Judith Goldman at the University of Chicago, below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afGPPySqnzY