The Museum of Clear Ideas: New Poems.

Donald Hall's new book of poems, The Museum of Clear Ideas, made me want to run out into the yard and shout. And check the tomatoes, and the box scores. To reread Horace, James Wright, and to undertake a study of the undervalued art of tone. As I write, we have shaken loose the bonds of the basketball season, and turned our full attention to baseball. If you're near a major league stadium, you're probably close to a bookstore that carries poetry. Get The Museum of Clear Ideas; it's perfect for the season, and you can reread it when winter comes and the tyranny of the hoop grips the nation once again.

Clad in Williams-and-Sonoma yuppie green, the book's cover only hints at its organizing conceit with an outline of home plate. The poems in this volume tackle the problem of coming to an ending from a variety of perspectives and forms: elegy, lyric sequence, and Horatian ode. Hall deploys his work in and against these genres in a sequence that invites meditation on their characteristic relations to time and to human means of marking time. If the shape of the sequence "Baseball," in nine innings, made of nine, nine-line stanzas suggests that the end must occur exactly where it does, when the form actually runs out, the poem leaves the reader in a condition of suspension between games, between actions, between memory of past seasons and appetite for another season:

9. No Red Sox tonight, but on Friday

a doubleheader with the Detroit

Tigers, my terrible old team, worse

than the Red Sox who beat the

Yankees

last night while my mother and I

watched

--the way we listened, fifty years

back--

spritely ghosts playing in heavy snow

on VHS 30 from Hartford,

and the pitcher stared at the batter.

Though they watch in the hospital, the outcomes of the illnesses that "Baseball" has documented go unreported; with a deft hand Hall waves away the symbols and allegories that so often infest literary versions of baseball. No home-run and heaven here. He directs our attention away from the diamond to the natural world:

By the railroad goldenrod stiffens;

asters begin a late pennant drive

in front of the barn; pink hollyhocks

wilt and sag like teams out of the race.

Good old-fashioned metaphor conjures up two kinds of time in a delightful shimmer of tenor and vehicle. "Baseball" inhabits an alternative realm already, a fictional space suspended outside of ordinary time. Addressed to the Dada collagist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), the poem attempts an explanation of the theory and practice of baseball, through meditations obliquely related to the 9 x 9 x 9 form. The enjambment, or running over lines, between the stanzas of the "First Inning" contrast with the businesslike picked-up pace of the "Third Inning." In this fashion the shape of the sequence instructs its imagined reader in the pace(s) of the game. Yet the material contained in this vessel of Hall's invention suggests the reach and amplitude of an imagination at play in the fields of memory, opinion, prophecy, and fresh experience. Hall's ability to use varied sentence-structure, and the cohabitation of sentence and line in stanzas, to emphasize shifts in tone and rhetorical strategy keeps this long poem from dulling in the ear. This interesting communication makes a significant contribution to poetry's conversation about the relations between visual art and literature.

In focusing on "Baseball," I have leapt ahead in the order of the book, which begins, wryly, with "Another Elegy." When I heard Hall read this poem, he explained that the fiction of the poem allowed him to write his long-stalled elegy for the poet James Wright, who died in 1980. Bill Trout, the dead poet remembered in "Another Elegy," is a creature of invention, but this has been the case in poets' elegies for fellow poets, from Milton at least. How much does "Lycidas" tell us about dead Edward King, and how much about ambitious John Milton? Even the rhetoric of praise and blame distorts the remembered life. Hall writes a canny critique of the form and its history:

It is twelve Aprils since we buried

him. Now dissertation-

salt preserves The Collected Poems 

of William Trout

like Lenin. Here is another elegy in

the tradition

of mourning and envy, love and self-love--as

another morning

delivers rain on the fishbone leaves

of the rotted year.

The humor with which Hall delivers and lampoons the conventions of elegy is carried further by the hilarious spoof of the canonizing poet's bio, "from" the imaginary The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Verse. Appearing in the "notes" section of The Museum of Clear Ideas, this further fiction lays bare a convention of contemporary poetry books: the appendix of notes used as an exhibit of the poet's learning and as a key to obscurities the reader will have encountered.

Hall identifies the persona, Horace Horsecollar, who speaks the odes of the poem "The Museum of Clear Ideas," in such a note: "Lacking Latin, he follows his master visually--the number and shape of stanzas in Horace's first book of odes." These poems form the volume's second sequence, in which the range of tones and topics widens even further. As in "Another Elegy" and "Baseball," the state of contemporary poetry comes under Hall's scrutiny; Horsecollar does not exempt his ventriloquizer when he criticizes: "Praising our places, we / praise ourselves while pretending to look outward." Poets build shrines to themselves,

in every Poetry, by printing

reflections, in free verse 

without noticeable attention to

line breaks, on snapshots of the

poetic mother and father,

in their weird clothes, on

vacation, before

the poet was born; How poignant it

is, how remarkable

that one's parents were older

than oneself!

Then they died. Oh.

This cutting indictment of the bland subject matter and weak form of contemporary poetry does not attempt to disguise Hall's own interest in remembering persons and places, in fixing the details of daily life in verse. In The Museum of Clear Ideas a reader will find love poems, poems about a sick parent, frightening diagnoses, aging, sex, and the old neighborhood. Hall does not eschew the ordinary; he inhabits it. Books and poems and language belong in this poet's everyday world, so we find poems about old affairs or old friends cheek by jowl with his criticism of contemporary poetry.

Hall's determination to renew language's energetic engagement with the world calls our attention to the rhetoric we use in our daily interactions. Hall deplores the falsity of what he calls "The Jargon of Things," and "The Tongue of High Coy." In a book preoccupied with the problem of making an end, of reacting honestly to the endings that herald our own foregone conclusion, the danger of language's misuse should not be underestimated.

The final poem in the book, "Extra Innings," takes up the fear of death directly. In these extra poems, which surprise the reader with a return to "Baseball," Hall suggests that compassionate actions and the solaces of dailiness can hold fear at bay. Loss is forestalled but not denied in the conclusion to "Extra Innings," which recalls the penultimate game of the 1975 World Series:

I wear my yellow sweater; we eat scrambled eggs from blue and

white dishes; her hair's kerchief is yellow. We gather

yellow days inning by inning with care to appear

careless, thinking again how Carlton Fisk 

ended game Six in the twelfth inning with a poke over

the wall.

Do I need to point out that the Red Sox go on to lose the Series in the seventh game? Anyone who has suffered with a team, or waited for the results of the blood test to come in, knows the condition that Hall describes, "inning by inning with care to appear careless." Hall celebrates the ceremonial calendar of the baseball season in its relation to human lives. In poetry, in patterned language unleashed in time, Hall arrests us in the moment of hope that holds off the end.