In his latest collection, Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, Anthony Madrid communicates such an odd wisdom that even references to death read like a sleight of hand:
One is trying to get something out of a coat pocket
without first removing one’s glove.
Soon enough, one gives up, strips the hand:
to liberate its precision.
So, too, at death: one “strips the hand”—only,
it is the hand itself that comes off. (30)
As noted in Madrid’s foreword, this section comprises one of a projected one hundred ruba’i, a classical Persian form marked by rhyming quatrains. It’s yet another ancient form Madrid refashions into his own plaything, extending his experiments with the ghazal in his cacophonous debut collection I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say (Canarium Books, 2012). What you get are these eerie dispatches meant to elicit a mix of discomfort, incredulity, and delight: the idea that a person who has committed a crime “has ‘gone’ when it wasn’t their turn” (30); that a camera “is only interested in the beautiful; / the novel, in the young” (29). Each of these quatrains concludes syllogistically, as though coming down from on high—as Madrid writes, “When it’s your turn, you can be cruel as you like” (30).
Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise is figured in the signature Madrid blend: the poems are built from maxim and miscellany, hardcore irony, and children’s rhyme, employing classical forms as a testing ground for obscene experiments in verse. As to subject and theme, Madrid does not so much offer a throughline as he does a mental accounting of the objects, ideas, and debris that flow freely and rapidly from the poet’s psyche onto the page. But he also brings an awareness of the resulting idiosyncrasies into the poems, a way to head off the charge of hermeticism that might attach to poets so driven by whim, parody, and the pleasure principle: “As a poet, MADRID was the jazz they play through the phone when you’re on hold,” the speaker says in “Plays with Fire Should Savor Smoke.” “The stuff one hums to oneself while folding laundry… / Anodyne toodle-oo jazz that can’t hold a shape / any more than can a moon-negative of a tulip” (46–47).
As in his previous collections, the poems in this group invoke both the austerity and high diction of bygone traditions while also mixing in more accessibly personal modes of address. For one, the book is filled with anecdotes and inside jokes, including gratuitous confession and occasional bursts of snarky, slangy shit-talk. “The poems in that book suck bug nuts,” the speaker says in “Pretty Little Failboat.” Then later: “Sucks to suck, my poo nugget” (62). Even in their tonal variety, the poems maintain a baseline vibe that’s all play and perversity, moving quickly and often from registers of Zen dispassion (in which we picture Madrid: “Just like the scholar Fu Sheng / transmitting the Book of Documents”) to the language of everyday vulgarity—sometimes in the span of a few lines (23). It’s an odd brew, but one familiar to his accustomed readers.
Enlightened oratory as a projection of poetic voice, invoking hidden truths and sacred mysteries, pairs bizarrely with the self-conscious and idiomatic qualities of Madrid’s writing. At a moment when the idea of formal verse has all but disappeared from literary publishing vernacular, Madrid’s neo- or quasi-formalism doubles as a kind of metacommentary on the state of the canon: on an individual’s relationship to broader literary trends. Here, Madrid’s engagement extends beyond the poems. In a recent review of Maggie Miller’s Couplets: A Love Story, he offers a rebuke of the ongoing pancaking of formal poetic tradition into parameter-less free verse.[1] Madrid’s poetics resist the more “high concept,” easily digestible modes not least because he chooses to work within the fixed constraints of older forms. The “rhyme effect,” for instance, transparently communicates an “effort” that goes into poem making that isn’t arbitrary—even if the end result is largely ornamental. In attempting to establish a new continuity with the ancient techniques, Madrid recalls a world of craft slowed to distill the labor of metrical schemes, rhetoricity, and allusion—all of it as essential to the experience of reading him as his ostensible “subjects” are.
But the old formulae do not easily unfasten from the styles and shibboleths they once accompanied, and Madrid walks a tightrope in luring the contemporary reader, who is likely to avoid the flowery toned didact speaking in tongues for glossier titles by the more institutionally embraced. In addition to the ghazal and the ruba’i, he debuts another borrowed creation in this latest work: the “gnomic stanza,” a form with roots in the sixth century BCE that delivers aphorisms or maxims. In his “Nineteen Gnomic Stanzas,” wisdom is imputed not by deduction but rather through a kind of exalted poetic math. Though it often comes by syllogism, it’s achieved through forced association—the square pegging of what’s surreal and slightly askew into metaphor: “Each oily black bug on its back / is a baby waiting to be changed. / You and the love of your life / are often estranged” (15).
Far from condemning what’s passé, Madrid’s imitations of wisdom literature traditions import tones of authority and lordliness we associate with those early forms: “On beauty we must pay a tax, / no matter how much we’re earning,” reads “Birthday Poem for Roma Cady Macpherson-Wilson, 2 January 2019, Ætatis Suæ XV” (18). Not only does he begin with the lyric prepositional inversion (“On beauty”), but it comes couched in biblical conceit and matter-of-factness. Divine discernment arrives, or is rather confirmed, in the lines that close out the quatrain, fulfilling the request for rhyme: “If God gave the swallow nothing else, / he gave it swiftness in turning” (18).
Yet Madrid sometimes opts for a dry delivery. All the complaining and grousing in this collection foregrounds a more fractured subjectivity, placing his speakers squarely in the literary present, where aesthetic seriousness is demonstrated less in the line and more in relation to the artist’s thinking about irony and sincerity. Hence, it would seem impossible to assume the persona of the master guru or mystic without that touch of parody. In fact, it might just be the whole point. Madrid says so himself, or, rather, invites us to infer as much in an online entry defending the use of irony as a conduit for feeling and sophistication as part of the parodist’s mandate. What better way to win over the reader, he argues, than by turning parody inward? Sophistication, Madrid writes, “involves taking a bit of a stand against oneself—which brings irony into the picture. And often enough, this very move brings the feelings in.”[2]
Zoom in on this latest Madrid jazz, and theories like this start to come at you. Regarding sophistication, Madrid’s own doesn’t end at the sentiment quoted above, his reads instead like a parody of that very maneuver. “My sovereign said I’d be paid in gold, for every verse I composed,” the speaker says in “The Infinitely Long Need Not be Wide.” Which verses will he cut, and “which can [he] not bear to?” the poem asks. A great question, especially following such lines as: “The pulse in the diamond’s lymph nodes cannot be perceived by sensualists. / But the pure of heart can hear the thoughts of the eels in the Gulf of Mexico” (40). These lines point to someone behind the scenes with a certain zeal for monkey business. We can see the rhymester hard at work, aping up the structures of comprehension. What of the diamond’s lymph nodes? Who are the sensualists? Why the eels in the Gulf of Mexico?
This fancy-pants horseplay recalls the constant harping on about the distinction between the poet and speaker (or persona)—and equally, of T. S. Eliot’s dictum that poetry “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”[3] In Whatever’s Forbidden the Wise, as in Madrid’s previous works, we’re reminded that a poem speaks through a set of images or ideas, and through an airy, impersonal voice from above that conveys those elements to the reader—a voice that imparts data from the self then used in the construction of new entities, or personae, within the poem (the poet’s own designs can try on their own masks, of course). From “The Root Not Where It Should Be”:
—“Go die, Madrid! Since you don’t know how to live.”
—Madrid says: “Fine, I’ll die.”
And now I’m a ghost, the ghost of myself,
and permitted to speak from the Void. (41)
It’s in the new sequence of ghazals that this effect is most obvious. The coupletted form often concludes with some stylized reference to the poet, and Madrid seizes the occasion to blur the lines even further (after all, Henry both is and is not Berryman, etc.). The nine new ghazals written during the COVID-19 pandemic also see the return of “Mardud,” an alter ego expressed as a typo, who has appeared in Madrid’s previous works and who helps construct our sense of the speaker through the third person remove. He is almost certainly a serious poet, but one who can’t resist a one-liner—or rather, is drawn to them by way of incantation. Wit and intelligence are certainly deliverables in this sequence, but the intended result is the generation of what Madrid calls “delight-provoking speech”—a realm of signification marked by Falstaffian incongruity, sonic pleasure, and unconscious association. Here, the obvious precursor is Edward Lear and the English limerick.[4] Indeed, Lear’s influence is as clear and direct in this and Madrid’s older works. Here are stanzas from “Here is Arty Veronica,” happy nonsense from late in the collection:
The monkeypriest and the poopycup
Were stupid with admiration.
They stood too close and got fucked up
By the rep from Aryan Nation.
Monkey see, monkey write.
Colin Clout’s come home again.
But blood is not ink despite
Your feeding it through a pen.
Daughter, where is your dog collar?
Where are your whips and plugs?
I don’t know why I bother
Policing these little thugs. (53)
Some things immediately jump out at us. For one, the storybook delivery—composed in rhyme—of white supremacy confuses our sensibilities; references that readily conjure the racism of the 1970s and ’80s become even harder to stomach when conveyed in the style of a limerick. But the poem doesn’t resolve our questions about its allusions. Instead, it continues producing them in rapid succession, contriving rhymes from references in a process demonstrating that we, as readers, needn’t be so invested in the material progression of things—never mind meaning. The signals we get from “Aryan Nation” are flooded by the music of the poem, which subjugates all meaning to sound. Everyday resonance and shared understanding break down; debris from the demo job is reworked into a song of the self, parodied at every turn: “I don’t know why I bother / Policing these little thugs.” Then, sometime later: “Oh, Alpha Zulu Foxtrot!”; “Hakuna / Matata, Nezhukumatathil” (54–55).
Throughout Madrid’s body of work, one detects a binding thread: his use of sacrality toward the production of a didactic mode that offers only the illusion of wisdom. The strength of the illusion depends, naturally, on the rhetorical force applied. As this process ratchets up, what you get is a kind of unfalsifiable sophistry—aesthetic terrain marked by a performance of conviction (and irony) that acts on the reader in a manner not unlike a snake charmer, but without the prospect of direct harm or confrontation. Elsewhere, Madrid invokes the critic as a way of speaking more directly to ongoing aesthetic debates, proving that the best critiques are those inked in bon mot: “Most poetry translations are hairless cats,” the speaker says in “About Where to Build.” “Apparently nobody minds, / as long as the wadded blob of elbow skin says meow” (43).
Madrid is scrupulous, however, not to overstep as he borrows (indeed, one might say that he borrows in homage). His scholarly intimacy with Eastern texts reads like praxis—it helps him avoid the pitfalls of the white male writer writing toward an imitation of ancient tongues. For Madrid, it’s less about the “exotic” allure of any one tradition than it is the strangeness produced in synthesizing several—that, plus the reader’s capacity to be staggered by forces not easily understood. Hence, he can turn even the most far-fetched articles of the imagination into moments of divine intrigue. The resulting mash-ups are unlike anything you might find in contemporary American poetry. Consider these lines from “Baby Snake Signs with a Flourish”:
A male bison is a torn-up carpet.
A male bison is Wallace Stevens.
Saying “My guru is exempt”
releases demons. (20)
Certainly, the torn-up carpet-like nearness of the bison satisfies, if purely descriptively. But in what figurative universe does a “male bison” evoke, using the depictive logic of the preceding line, the oft-cited modernist poet? In one powered by nonsense rhyme, but also incongruity. The sonic interlinking forces the issue. Again, here’s Madrid addressing the matter: “The unconscious ideal was that the two words should be linked by sound alone,” he elaborates in his dissertation on late seventeenth century British poetry, aptly titled The Warrant for Rhyme.[5] It’s precisely in subverting the reader’s expectations of metaphor’s patterning—the way it attaches to, and tracks within, a poem’s design—that Madrid trains a new logic of correspondence. These elisions help us to square whatever complaints we may harbor of metaphor’s contrived similitude with the pleasure of seeing its transitive objects even more off kilter. Like the owl, which in “Baby Snake Signs with a Flourish,” is “an orchestral kettledrum. / Is a French horn with a button-down beak” (21). Or the star Deneb in the constellation of Cygnus (its brightest) which, radiating enormously in the night’s sky, “is the swan’s ass flap” (20). He summarizes:
Here’s a wintergreen field of sagebrush,
twisted up at the foot of a fawn.
At the moment of Perfect Enlightenment,
Buddha’s gone. (21)
Buddha may well be gone, but Madrid is still with us. The hand is well attached; the fountain pen from which at least one poem in this latest collection flowed—in perfect working order. At a moment when American poetry seems increasingly of a piece with the conventions of mass digital culture, these poems offer a counterpoint. Their constant rhetorical gesturing reminds us that all language, in time, becomes archaic, that the sacred and the profane are not all that far apart—and when brought together, can sometimes hit elevated notes.
Notes:
[1] Anthony Madrid, review of Couplets: A Love Story, by Maggie Millner, RHINO (2023), https://rhinopoetry.org/reviews/couplets-a-love-story-by-maggie-millner.
[2] Anthony Madrid, “Irony and Sophistication,” Boston Review (December 2012), https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/irony-and-sophistication/.
[3] T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” the Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent.
[4] Anthony Madrid, “Lear’s Shadow,” Poetry (July/August 2015), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70229/lears-shadow.
[5] Anthony Madrid, “The Warrant for Rhyme,” PhD diss., the University of Chicago, 2012, v, http://proxy.uchicago.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/warrant-rhyme/docview/1030961287/se-2?accountid=14657.