Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005),
hbk, 96pp., $13.60.

     Bidart’s latest book, Star Dust, resonates with readers more because of its style than its now oft-advertised argument about “making” and what it means to make. The poems resonate at multiple levels of consciousness, and the volubility of the poems overcomes their sometimes inchoate musicality. The destruction of their own aims—their nihilism muffled by organic desire—stands alongside many such ideas in the poetry marketplace. What differs with Bidart is worth remarking on, however.

     A single read of the poems makes explicit the argument of the book. In the now oft-quoted take of Bidart on Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers,” he asserts that “many creatures must make.” The key word here is “must”; and he continues with, “but only one must seek within itself what to make.” The explicitness of Bidart’s desire for clarity renders it almost too easy to discover the purpose of Star Dust. This said, the pleasures of the collection come far more from its esoteric moments and its overarching tropes—those which hide just behind the “veil”—than from what is, so to speak, chopped off the beast and handed to the reader on a platter.

     In “Advice to the Players” we get the lines, “Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves,” and “Without clarity about what we make, and the choices that underlie it, the need to make is a curse, a misfortune.” This second (and oft-quoted) passage seems to be a call to arms for the romantic notion of “art” with a capital “A”. While such a making is important, the assertions here are not elitist—at least not in that run-of-the-mill, Soho-bohemian, alternative-education, art-school way.

     Bidart’s elitism stakes its claim over Yale Professor and garage mechanic alike. In “Hammer,” the Yale professor is damned, as “when the quest is indecipherable,— / what is left is a career.” Here Bidart convulses his assertions, beginning the poem with the couplet, “The stone arm raising a stone hammer / dreams it can descend upon itself.” He begins, that is, with the absolute certainty that the trapped desire their freedom. Never does the reader doubt that—unfailingly, universally—the goal must be (as Bidart closes the poem), “To be both author of / this statue, and the statue itself.”

     The difference between Bidart’s view of “making” and that of other poets is by and large one of stylistic differentiation. Yet it is not simply that his penchant for the ecstatic differentiates his work, and, while I adore his ejaculatory aesthetics, as in “Luggage,” when  “...Fucking, I can feel / the valve opening,” this differentiation is not, either, in his ability to project anger and violence through images which seem simultaneously over- and under-stated—as in “Curse,” where, literally cursing the pilots of the two planes which crashed into the Twin Towers, he writes, “May breath for a dead moment cease as jerking your / head upward you hear as if in slow motion floor / collapse evenly upon floor as one hundred and ten / floors descend upon you.”

     Star Dust is, in essence, a bivalve organism. The “left side” of the book is comprised of short poems, mostly those from Bidart’s chapbook, Music Like Dirt, and ends with the title poem, “Star Dust.” It is in “Star Dust” that we finally close in on the truth of Bidart’s unique brand of making.  In the midst of a lament, the reader is given the line, “The shimmering improvisations designed to save us / fire melts to law.” This paradox does much to confirm that Bidart’s beauty is in his fire, in his assertions lacking all hesitation, his poetic sensibilities turned at once and finally to command. Yet what makes these assertions so believable, what makes them so irrefutably true, makes them also, as it were, false gods, as false and arbitrary and banal as any “laws”—the very enemy, it seems, of Bidart’s own spirit. Bidart’s assertive power is what makes his work both beautiful and believable—and this assertive quality is also what gives his poetry its self-negating, self-denying qualities.

     It is a subtle point, but no less true for that: the vulnerability in Bidart’s poems, often hidden beneath an aggressive posture, is what draws us to them. No poem displays this self-abnegation as explicitly as does “Phenomonology of the Prick.” In “Phenomonology,” the speaker undresses in the same room as a long-time friend—and others. The friend is one he has secretly desired for years; an open secret. In the poem, the speaker asserts his friend is aware of his desire to see him naked, and subsequently, the friend approaches his own wife— ensuring, in the meantime, that the speaker can “see it hard.” The speaker recalls, then, a moment in the past in which the friend bragged about being able to exploit the speaker’s affections, saying that he could “get Frank’s car keys tonight. Frank[...]will do anything I want.” That memory, interlaced with the present—in which the speaker observes his friend and his friend’s wife having sex—gives the speaker the opportunity to assert his own disempowerment. As the speaker asks, rhetorically, “Did you want fixed in my brain / what I will not ever possess.”

     Even here, however, the speaker has rendered the event in self-referential terms, assuming, in fact, that the entire scene had been arranged for his own pleasure (or displeasure).  In the closing lines, the speaker even secretly reclaims his friend from his friend’s wife, saying, “You make sure / I see how hard / your wife makes it.” Here the speaker inserts his own subtext: that his friend has a difficult time performing when making love to his wife. The difficulty of the friend’s orgasm, a sad reward for the speaker-cum-observer, reassures the speaker. The poem thus locates itself at a precise point on the axis of an event, and, moreover, the reader implicitly trusts this self-location—despite its obvious unreliability. 

     If the poem were just an account of a sex act in which the speaker could not participate, the poem would have little allure. It would be, in fact, a simple poem of unrequited homosexual desire, and fairly banal, in consequence. The poem’s depth comes, instead, from its ancillary effects: like a corona around the poem, the work’s deeply evocative qualities arise from its assertion of so much on behalf of the self—a self that, in all likelihood, is not really “there” at all. The speaker manifests a world true to himself, but still fundamentally false: his desire forms a veil over the emptiness which lies beneath. The surface given the story, too, is sad, but even more evocative is the solipsism’s radial emotional impact: to be the maker of the dream and, as Bidart does here, to recognize also that the dream made is composed of falsehoods is somehow maddening, wonderful, grotesque, and poignant all at once.

     The “Phenomenology of the Prick” most succinctly illustrates what differentiates Bidart from the masses of publishing poets caught up in the aesthetics of desire and making. Bidart’s assertive poetics are a first-order skill; a second-order skill is his unique ability to capture his own posture in the moment of its “making,” thereby exposing its soft, quiet, and tragic underbelly.

     In the second half of Star Dust, Bidart offers the long poem “The Third Hour of the Night.” Much has been made of this poem, as it’s nominally the third in a sequence of longer poems which began with “The First Hour of the Night” (from an earlier work). Indeed, each marks a particular period in Bidart’s life: an hour of the night—if, for a moment, one could equate life to darkness.  “The Third Hour of the Night” follows the collection’s title poem, and comprises the whole “right side” (as it were) of the book. As discussing the poem on its own merits is more illustrative than attempting to situate it as the third piece in a triptych, I’ll leave doing so to biographers, or others more concerned with profiling the personality of the poet than his poetry itself.

     Bidart ranks above any other modern poet in his ability to assert an aesthetic position. Many would argue that Bidart avoids the didactic; I’d charge that he burrows right through didacticism. Bidart’s work is assuredly not mild—and trying to avoid the fact that it is didactic misses, in large part, the stylistic power of Bidart’s making. Here I speak of “making” in two ways: first, as Bidart’s own way of making, and second, as the way in which (Bidart asserts) the concept of making manifests itself in the world. I think most readers will pay attention to the grandiosity of Bidart’s argument as to this latter brand of making, and yet, to this reader, the beheading of Medusa—the slaying of what paralyzes us—has more effect, as it represents Bidart’s own brand of making.

     In Bidart’s “The Third Hour of the Night,” all of his charged tropes, his staunch and stark explications, and his candid violence press upon the reader in ways his shorter poems do not and cannot.  “The Third Hour of the Night” is broken into three parts: the first, personal; the second, the story of Benvenuto Cellini; and the third, the story of a shaman killing a woman with a magic “killing stick.” Only in concert with the interlacing of Bidart’s “Atropos Lachesis Clotho” could such disconnectedness seem so very sensible.

     In the second section of “The Third Hour of the Night,” Bevenuto Cellini is asked by Duke Cosimo to “make a ring / unlike all others for his daughter’s wedding”; Cellini requests payment in the form of one of the lions of Florence. Cellini ultimately asks the Duke “to drug the strongest lion / asleep” so that he can “examine” the body of the beast for his art. At first the Duke declines, but, finding no one else capable of doing the job, concedes—and Cellini thereby gets his due:

         “The animal was numbed but not

         sleeping; he tried to raise
         his great head, as I lay lengthwise against his warm body;

         the head fell back. My head

         nestling behind his, each arm, outstretched, slowly
         descending along each leg, at last with both hands I
        
         pulled back the fur and touched a claw.
        
         This creature whose claw waking could kill me,—
         ....I wore its skin.”

     What to make of this abuse? That art can call even a commander of the State to lay low his own beasts? That art bears no allegiance to either the state or nature? That Cellini’s nature is one with the lion’s—and that this is a nature which, once awoken, could kill? That Cellini heeds no consequences, and simply desires what he desires: to lay next to, aside, and within the most powerful beast he can imagine? The act of desire, then, is his art; desire makes, and with Cellini, it makes art.

     But why make? And why make art? Why make poetry at all? In “The Third Hour of the Night,” Bidart answers this question with remarkable precision.  Cellini, contemplating his desire to murder Bandinelli, says “My art is my revenge.” The convergence of Cellini and Bidart crystallizes with these words. As seen in “Curse” and “Phenomenology of the Prick,” art—poems, in Bidart’s case—exact their measures.  Art somehow amends, veils, unveils, and takes revenge on that which one otherwise cannot touch.

     On first pass, “Star Dust” (the poem) seems the most fully-rendered piece in the collection, and thus the “best” choice to serve as the book’s title piece. Reading the collection more deeply, however, I’m not so sure; my sense is that the collection would have been better served with a different title. Of course, this objection is slight, and in no way bears upon the deeply evocative nature of Bidart’s penetrating poetry.

     Star Dust should be closely read by all practicing poets; Bidart’s work forces its reader to acknowledge the weak-kneed shuffle most of us make from one day to the next: the concupiscent acquiescence to one’s own mores, politics, obsequiousness, restraints, and politeness. At the same time, the collection rewards any reader—artist or otherwise—who is engaged in the process of making, and willing to consider what it is that gets unmade or excluded by the force of such making.

     Bidart leaves his reader—as though on the very bed of his poetry—exposed: a post-coital sensation of sadness, joy, and anger. Yet, too, he leaves us hungry for more. That desire, in and of itself, is like the lion of Florence, for “Understand that there is a beast within you / that can drink till it is / sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.”

                                                                             — David Koehn