Coachella Elegy
by Christian Gullette
(Trio House Press, 2024, 90 pp., $18.00)
Though our love affair with Poundian immediacy, smuggled abroad in 1915’s Cathay, has cooled, like abiogenesis its lessons—the conjunctionless observation, the epiphanic utterance—have spontaneously reemerged. In its way, the frequently haiku-like movement of Christian Gullette’s poetry, which approximates the slow seesawing of a leaf between each sealed-off thought, is such a case. It’s no exaggeration that a cluster of his stanzas, chosen right, would easily pass for one of Kenneth Rexroth’s loose translations of Tu Fu:
Without indoors or outdoors,
I can invite everything in.
By the searing, metal ladder,
memory is too hot
to climb out of.
My husband watches from a strip
of artificial grass.
In the desert,
you have big afternoons
not big nights.
To be sure, these are not the Zhongnan Mountains of Daoist hermits but those surrounding the resort city of Palm Springs, located in the Coachella Valley. Yet if the overflows of Coachella Elegy may be adequately described as emotion recollected in sobriety (“we don’t lose / these scenes // when we come / down to / street level”), there’s still enough alcohol here to plaster Li Bai.
Departing from the influence of Richie Hofmann, whose unattributed yous and lavender-scented aesthetics are proving irresistible for many of his generation (possibly Hofmann, too), both Gullette’s geographic fixation and his clarity can be found in David Hockney, for whom a swimming pool broke cleanly into its lattice of white-and-blue shadows (“squiggles / hand-painted by the artist”) and taut surface—with or without the crowning splash. On offer in this collection is a schmaltzless nostalgia as light as pumice. While people are seldom talked about in isolation, tonally there is a figured aloneness to Gullette’s one-page dramas, which hustle local props and a bit of furniture into affecting dioramas:
The season’s first artichoke weighed
almost nothing
like your head the first time
I ever cradled it
in my lap
after your radiation treatment.
As with “the Virgin, / a bottle of poppers at her feet,” whose fate is to carry God to term while “know[ing] / what omens feel like,” Coachella Elegy is death-freighted, between the loss of a sibling in a car accident and a husband’s cancer. Though the mood in these poems is, as promised, elegiac, what you get is a serene melancholy, not battered by a gauntlet of hospital visits and the looming threat of wildfires, but quieted. Purposeful rather than dizzy with self-pity, it’s a sort of anti-stoicism of “mimosa light” and “kidney-shaped pools” that also knows better.
Following the existential crisis of the Eighties and Nineties, blood and tears would seem to be in rhetorical free fall of late. Sex in this collection, however, is refreshingly adult, eschewing the puerile teasing and breathy flamboyance that makes so much contemporary poetry appear desperately exhibitionist. Despite Gullette’s interest in desert getaways with outdoor showers, to its benefit there’s little sweat in Coachella Elegy (the pools—saltwater, heated or not—are innumerable). For all its lean health, and notwithstanding the turbid underlayment, in places Gullette has pared things to the quick. Beyond the glimmers and temptations of “a plywood empire / backed by buttresses,” Elegy’s tissue of imagery is held together by a cartilage of stage directions and psychological marginalia. That scenic divisibility, filled in by the stanza like a canvas’s visual elements (“His brain looks like water / after rinsing a brush”), forgoes the mush of impressionism for actuality; seen through the transparent shimmer of Sonoran heat, like inebriation it tinges what is observed at the distance of memory or physical space (and reminiscent, too, of peering through a hotel rooftop’s cloudy plexiglass barrier). This happens to the extent that Gullette will address one subject while, tacitly, alluding to another; for instance, the amount of water almond-farming demands: “Why grow something so hard to satisfy?”
It is clear that Gullette’s style, chiseled by grief, has mostly outswam the tide of literary faddism. The advantage of saying less is that one doesn’t, of course—except he could do without the DJs and Jell-O shots, which read like a pop refrain. Then, compared with the diminutive charm of “Bees in the Maraschino Cherry Factory” or “Seahorse with Cotton Swab,” Gullette’s titles occasionally disserve the poems they open for, amplifying their minimalism. If phrasing less at-hand than “Clothing Optional” and “Election Night” wouldn’t necessarily have wrinkled his starch-crisp voicing, Gullette’s endings have the effect of slightly qualifying matters, of leaving the air charged with ambiguity: the detail one neither immediately notices nor entirely misses, such as “the clink / of forks as people laugh // and touch each other on the shoulder / when they agree.” These soft about-faces, a neutral mystery equal parts studium and punctum, simultaneously disarm and elevate; there is a note of severity you didn’t hear earlier in the poem, and now it’s over. The sharpest of these include being told that the reform school, from where Gullette’s brother has mailed him a letter for batteries, doesn’t allow its boarders to keep electronics.
Running throughout the book like an interstate or a stretch of tarmac is a trio of isolated prose paragraphs dedicated to travel. While the conceptual relevance of these poems to the whole isn’t obvious, Gullette’s suggestion might be that Southern California is a place one constantly leaves and returns to (“It’s the fleeing that / makes it tender”), besides the hint of jet-setting, contrasted with his brother’s compulsive, looping highway drives “for hours in circles, never getting lost.” Eventually we get the du jour land acknowledgement, with an allusion to the Yuma railroad and its ruinous effect on indigenous homesteaders, but such topics deserve project-length status. Barring that, good intentions, pledged out of some sense of ethical duty, only sound perfunctory. Gullette’s gift lies in addressing hardly anything at all: sneaking beer through a Marriott lobby, or a Christmas tree “evangelical in its / smell.” The result can be a pint-sized marvel:
Hives emblazoned on temple doors and traffic signs,
this 45th state full of dinosaur bones.
Scientists can’t find the bee graves either,
hidden in these mountains.
Nearby there’s a ski lift
where a hundred years ago
people in cabins died young
like my brother.
We plant flowers in the median strip
near the spot he rolled his Jeep
while the 7-Eleven cashier watched
through bulletproof glass.
Only traces of him
remain in the desert, small as pollen,
which is what they find in mummy stomachs:
Ice Age flowers.
Though cynical editorialists try to dissuade us, the typical reader wants to clap at a Roman candle of intelligence. In addition to university lecturing, Gullette freelances as a translator of Swedish; and, while Coachella Elegy could afford to stock up on commas (“On a Mendocino cliff // three rusty links of a chain // dangle like a brooch // but just three”), it may be worth noting that Swedish grammar is largely paratactic, marshaling clauses without explicitly indicating their relationship via connectives. The specter of Ezra Pound haunts these poems. As in Pound—the unbidden, thought-like intrusion of those dead petals on that wet, black bough—Gullette’s images just show up. This, for me, explains Gullette’s tendency to judder every other first stanza with an incomplete sentence. More to the point, it reinvigorates a game of telephone (known abroad, a tad problematically, as Chinese whispers) between Fenollosa’s notebooks, that flawed Rosetta Stone which put Europe in fear of abstractions, and the highly mercurial spirit of poetry this century. What is more American than changing one’s mind?