Reviewed by Summer Block
6.13.07

In J.P Greene’s “about the author” blurb, the poet boasts as many as six professions, including printer, school teacher, tech writer, and the unwieldy “plant location-area development consultant.” In mind of his poetry compilation The Optics of Evening, I might suggest a third, that of literature professor. While Greene’s poetry is willfully opaque, his accompanying prose discourse on the history of western literature is clear and instructive—perfect for an academic seminar, if not a poetry reading.

The Optics of Evening is a cumbersome, sometimes impenetrable work consisting of 25 poems characterized by riddles such as:

It was different
Because there was no reason
For it; nor, because of that,
For them. But precisely for that
Reason if there is a reason
For everything
Again,
Was it different?

Greene’s poetry is sly and knowing, if not overly generous, and most of his poems have a charming allusive quality that isn’t afraid to banter playfully with the greats, whether Eliot or Falstaff. Some are downright funny, as in “Edgewise On”: “your real reason for taking the kids to the museum/being so they know/that what’s in it belongs there.” Sadly, these little gems are hidden in a lot of verbiage, and it can be pretty hard going to find them.

What saves The Optics of Evening is the lengthy preface that begins the book, in which Greene neatly summarizes poetic history in the West and makes a strong case for new directions in this new century. The preface is smart, readable, and well-argued, though the poems that follow do little to back up Greene’s call for widely read and appreciated popular verse. (The poet himself disavows any intended connection between the preface and the poems that follow it.)

Viewing Greene as a professor and not a poet also sheds some light on his verse. Read as criticism, the poems in Optics become less puzzling and more purposeful—the poem’s tangled net of allusions is cast backward to form a meaningful connection with past literary eras, if not contemporary readers.

Greene’s preface begins by asking some very important, if not entirely original, questions.

“If epochal stylistic evolution has indeed come to an end, on what other grounds, if any, can future poetry rival the best from centuries past?”

“Why is contemporary poetry in fact not embraced with the same ready identification, the same intuitive grasp as were most great stylistic innovations of the past? Why are our ‘celebrated’ poets celebrated more by prize-givers, the literary press, and academia . . . than by a spontaneous, not to say fervent, public embrace?”

Is it that “the cultural sun of profoundly transformative creation has set and will not rise again”?

There are the sort of rallying cries that might be expected from someone like Harold Bloom, a professor of the old school, who holds no truck with postmodernist, deconstructionist fluff and wants us all to sit down and learn our Milton.

Greene goes on to present a short history of western poetry, beginning with the idea that “whereas the metaphysic of previous epochs appears through a distinctive unity of style, that of time present . . . appears in the opposite, an apparently self-inconsistent mélange, one might even say cacophony, of times, intentions, and modes of execution” (“style” is here defined as “a rhetoric faithful to something larger than its content”).

Briefly, Greene goes on to discuss the differences between past poetry and poetry today, touching on modern poetry’s lack of rhythmic effects and the lack of a poetic “personality” (here in the broad, Bloom-approved sense of Hamlet’s whole, infinite self), as well as quick, lucid disquisitions on the differences between Classical (Homeric) and Western cultures, or Henry James and Thomas Mann vs. James Joyce and Marcel Proust.

This is all heady stuff, but admirably handled. Greene is so approachable here that it’s all the more surprising when he launches into his first poem, “Hologram Variations,” a punishing 39-page poetic cycle punctuated by bracketed asides like “[Drumroll]” and “[Fanfare]” – a series of amusing vaudeville scenes interspersed with monologues both insipid and inspired.

Greene’s allusive verse may never find the wider audience he seeks for contemporary poetry, but his wise preface points the way forward for young writers hoping to wed clarity and vision. Although he’s perhaps a better professor than a poet, Greene is an asset to the poetic community.