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science and the state. Have we always gotten this right? No. But to invoke the specter of totalitarian coercion is either disingenuous or wildly alarmist. I suspect, in Weigels case, it is the latter. In Evangelical Catholicisma repetitious diatribe that advances its case by assertion rather than by argument or analysishe is convinced that the United States is teetering on the edge of a moral and political precipice, and that only a revival of Catholic belief and virtue can pull the nation back. Yet how likely is it that such a revival will occur? Weigel looks to the vitality and growth of Evangelical Protestantism for inspiration, but in the US, those churches are in decline. And younger Americans are fleeing organized religion in droves: fully one-third of those under 30 describe themselves as having no religion, an unprecedented development. According to the sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, younger Americans have rejected institutional religion precisely because it is too highly politicized. The uncompromising stance of conservative Christians like Weigel on abortion, homosexuality and sexual morality has not converted a generation of Americans, but rather deeply alienated them. Nor is it possible to police the boundaries of the Catholic Church in the way Weigel imagines. As with all voluntary associations, those boundaries are too porous and the tools available for border enforcement too weak. Discipline could be enforced in tribal Catholicism because it was tribal, its profound sense of solidarity forged on multiple personal, social and economic levels. Most Catholics in this country have long departed those ethnic enclaves to become fully assimilated Americans. In an essay published forty years ago in The New York Review of Books, the critic and novelist Wilfrid Sheed assessed the disarray that swept over the American Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. The one kind of society that the church cannot adjust to, Sheed wrote, is no society at all, i.e., a setup where community has become so fragmented that a communal religion is a fiction, sustained only by talk and make-news items in the press and television. hat materialistic, mobile and highly individualistic society is precisely where most Americans live. Weigel sees the problema collapse of institutional confidence has shaped his theology and neoconservative views as much as his passionate faith hasbut ignores the cause; he refuses to recognize that when it comes to the preservation of communities of faith and tradition, the great disaggregating force

is not the permissive morality of liberal elites but our economic system. A religion is simply a society in one of its aspects, Sheed wrote; and if the American Catholic Church is scattered and confused right now (and even its best friends dont deny it), consider the rest of America. And: The cure, if it comes, would include a cultural revolution affecting many things besides the Catholic Church. Sheed was the son of two of the greatest Catholic evangelists of the last century, but Im sure his longed-for revolution would not look anything like the one sketched in Evangelical Catholicism. Weigel proposes almost nothing but the kind of false choices we can no longer afford. Either you believe everything the church teaches or none of it; either you are against abortion or youre for it; either you know marriage was created by God or you think its infinitely malleable; either Americans are decadent, fuzzy-thinking liberals or strait-laced, right-thinking conservatives. Weigels sensibility is essentially Manichean, which is ironic in someone so boastful of his orthodox Christian credentials, and moreover his Manicheanism can be traced to his misreading of the Second Vatican Council. It is true that the council was evangelical and missionary in character, and that it did not shy from making universalistic claims. But the council fathers also recognized, crucially, that the churchs universalism will prove credible in the modern world only if its doors open both waysletting modernity in

as well as engaging with it criticallyand that this openness will have implications not only for the churchs culture, but also for its theology. Though Weigel would deny the charge, it is impossible to read Evangelical Catholicism and not think that he is determined to close as many doors as possible. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, a fitful Catholic who knew a thing or two about totalitarianism, had a better sense of where salvation might lie. For me the religious dimension is extremely important, he once said in an interview. I feel that everything depends on whether people are pious or not pious. Reverence toward being, which can be formulated in strictly religious terms or more general terms, that is the basic value. Piety protects us against nihilism. Weigel would judge harshly Miloszs belief that even nonbelievers can hold life sacred. But Milosz was right. Catholicism teaches that Gods presence is not confined to his church. He is also busy at work among pious liberals and secularists, although you would be hard-pressed to learn that religious truth from reading Weigels supposedly evangelical book. Like most Catholics, I dont believe that the liberals in the Obama administration are out to marginalize the Catholic Church or religious people generally. I suspect, in fact, that if the church is marginalized, it will mostly have itself to blameand also, to some extent, ardent defenders of the faith n like George Weigel.

Deliriums and Descents

by Robert Boyers
Metaphysical Dog
By Frank Bidart. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 113 pp. $24.

ow and then he calls himself Frank and remembers how often he has wanted to die, though he is possessed as well by the will to live. A convinced and dedicated truth-teller, he fears more than anything else the lies even he may be tempted to tell and therebyunbearable fatethe possibility that he may turn into one of those who routinely lie to themselves. Disdainful of the compromises we make to survive our grief and manias, he yet declares himself an adept at compensation, well wadded with art he adored and with stupidity and distraction. Wanting to go on with a life largely consigned to the proximate and partial, he craves the absolute while acknowledging that the hunger for what cannot be consum-

Robert Boyers is editor of Salmagundi and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute.

mated or understood is a kind of sickness. Obsessed with loss and the death or failure of love, perpetually unfulfilled, he makes an idol of Necessity and sings the praises of the box/ he cannot exit or rise above. In his poems, Frank Bidart has long favored words like caught and ruthless, couldnt and unable. From the beginning of his career, he has seemed more than half in love with the specter of his own incapacities and limitations, which he plays and replays in poems notable for an accent of obsession and fatedness. In early books like Golden State (1973), The Book of the Body (1977) and The Sacrifice (1983), he seemed content to work things out for himself largely by investing in the

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dramas of characters drawn from literature or the newspapers. There were also early poems focused on his own family members, or on himself, and his later poems are often devoted to other writers, historical figures or movie stars. But Bidart first attracted critical attention as the author of dramatic monologues built around the murderer and necrophiliac Herbert White, the suicidal Ellen West and the mad dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Early and late, with only rare exceptions, he has been a poet of extremity, of large emotions and unbearably heightened states of consciousness. No major poet of our time has been so unguarded as Bidart, so willing to travel to the dark places in the psyche, so recklessly earnest about his need to get to the bottom of things, apt not to relieve but to wound and exacerbate. I first communicated with Frank in 1976, when I asked him to write about Robert Lowell for a special issue of Salmagundi. I knew of Bidart then as a young poet who had improbably made himself indispensable to Lowell and to Elizabeth Bishop, both of whom deeply respected him and trusted him with the drafts of their poems. In the essay he wrote on Lowell, Bidart placed special emphasis on the poets will to be true to his obsessions and on his efforts to deal with intractable, unfashionable, or intolerable subject matter. Looking back at those words today, one sees that Bidart was inspired to do his own work by Lowells courage and stylistic cunning (his unending argument with the expressive limits and assumptions of the language). He quotes Lowells words from the end of The Dolphin: my eyes have seen what my hand did. Today, Bidart might say the same about his own remorseless vision. Some readers have thought Bidart a poet too insistently addicted to violence and extremity, too brutal and wild, and have thus misread his poetry as a flight from form and the embodiment of a radical alienation from ordinary life. In fact, as Lloyd Schwartz (among many others) has noted, the poetry is never far removed from traditional prosody and is marked by a literary richness that exhibits a total command of idiom, syntax and the rhetoric of incantation. Bidarts work has always resided in an improbable space, somewhere between expansiveness and constraint, the headlong and the measured, vital fleshly heat and meditative cerebral intensity. There are occasional grace notes and musical lifts in his poems but nothing like a wasted fragrance. Vigilant, never casual or blandly pleasant, his verses are open to surprise but wary of anything merely satisfactory or conclusive. Whatever his appetite for extremity, Bidart has always sought what Robert Hass once called a little tranquil island in all the

furythough when he spies it, he is at once moved to misgiving or reluctance. You cant stop moving when youre at rest, he writes in Ganymede. The deep ambivalence central to Bidarts sensibility is reflected in every aspect of his work, where the drive to focus and to grasp the fated, often terrible thing-in-itself is matched by the repeating intuition that the poet can never know what he is after. What can seem the expression of a fixed disposition is instead a strategy for unearthing forbidden or repressed emotions and entering a precinct where beauty and terror can seem indivisible. The struggles played out in Bidarts poems convey the sense that what we are about to discover will remain for us somewhat unintelligible, a species of primal guilt and primal suffering that mysteriously concerns us all. Extremity here is the expression not of the surrender to devastation or cruelty but of the sense that anything is possible, and that if there is logic, it is not the logic of stable proportions or normal relations. You are the leaping/ dog, Bidart writes of himself (in a poem named for his mother, Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall), a dog capricious on the grass, lunging/ at something only it can see, the leaping and lunging the consequence of the fact that, as in Dante, there she ate your heart.

tion or conjecture. But far more to the point is the promise everywhere inscribed in the poems: that everything must matter and that we have no choice but to stand with the poet in his deliriums and descents, required to be as vulnerable to pity and terror as he is. In signal respects, the glories of the Hours poems are present as well in all of Bidarts most compelling work. In an early poem called Golden State, the speaker declares, you and mother taught me/ theres little thats redemptive or useful/ in natural affections, but then soon announces his wish to unlearn what he has been taught. There is nothing final or comforting in the alternations that figure in this work, nothing certain but the determination that what is true be written into us, inscribed on our very souls, like the sentence inscribed on the bodies of those who submit to the harrow in Kafkas In the Penal Colony. When we read, in The Second Hour of the Night, that What she wants she does not want, we see that we are in the precinct this poet has made his own. The rage to feel, to take in what is real, to be at one with the pain of a life open to disappointment and betrayal, is poised against the will, almost but not quite commensurate, to get past it all and to be self-forgiven. The Myrrha of The Second Hour, who feels that she has

uch of the critical attention directed toward Bidart in recent years has focused on an evolving sequence of long poems associated with The Hours of the Night, based on the Egyptian Book of Gates, in which the sun must pass through twelve distinct hours of the night before finally rising. The first of these appeared in the volume In the Western Night (1990). Many critics believe that the three Hours poems Bidart has thus far published, in several different collections of his work, represent the high point of his achievement. There is much to be said for this view. Taken together, the three poems offer what James Longenbach calls a deliberately open-ended work of art whose shape will be determined by the vagaries of the life of its maker. Each of the poems is extraordinarily various, with competing voices, perspectives and story lines alternating. The promise of transformation or release haunts the poems but is never a finished enterprise. The stories are drawn from Ovid, from the life of Hector Berlioz, Benvenuto Cellini and others, from Bidart himself. The fascination generated by the poems is not easy to describe. There is the heightened coloring of the narrative, the lurid and erotically convulsive play of forces, the swerve from stunned immediacy to exalta-

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no choice but to make her way to her fathers bed, knows that I shall not rest until what has been/ lodged in me is neither/ lodged in menor NOT lodged in me. Such hunger belongs to a species of hysteria somewhat beyond the range of most ordinary human experience. And yet Bidart makes of it an entirely believable aspect of the common life. Reading him, one believes entirely in the reality of the desire that you do not want to desire. To want what you do not want is an essential component of the common life as this poet demands that we know it. The burden of bearing witness to this sense of things is ghastly, and yet there is no inclination to detachment or skepticism. Bidarts eloquence has everything to do with his total belief in the adequacy of the expressive resources available to him. There is no sign in Bidart of the fear that language will crack or fail, no sign that he has ever taken to heart the reluctances of Samuel Beckett. To read Bidart is to belong to him, to register the tensions that animate his every utterance. And yet the poems also act upon us as terrifying events we are condemned to follow out, journeys in which not less than everything is at stake and the pleasure entailed is the pleasure of submitting to an ordeal from which we emerge at last thrilled, exhausted and longing for more. here is no new iteration of Hour of the Night in Bidarts new book, Metaphysical Dog, though as always there are characters, miscellaneous voices, here a Whitman or an Ava Gardner, there a host of other fleeting creatures, as the poet calls them, that flit by/ giving themselves to us/ and the air. But most present

and emphatic is the poet himself, and also the parent figures that have long tormented his imagination, along with the shades and insinuating half-presences of masters that the poet wishes to inherit and inhabit. Which masters exactly? The onesnamed, unnameable, palpable, hallucinatedwho inspire the dream of revelation, in spite of the poets knowledge that history is a series of failed revelations. As always in Bidart, failure looms large, so that revelation can only seem intermittently promising, at best a noble fiction, a mirage from which the poet must always have great difficulty extricating himself. At each kids feet multitudinous voices, the poet declares, each of them promising enthrallment, recruitment, asking Who do you want to be swallowed by?revelation the palm at the end of the mind, obscure, necessary, assiduous. The modern temper has had limited patience for revelation, which has seemed attractive mainly to persons credulous or desperate, the ones who do not know how to live in the world as they find it. Bidart, to be sure, is such a person, uneasy with the standard arrangements, endowed with none of the careless abundance or unself-conscious charm of someone made for the world and its familiar gratifications. No pleasing vanities in Bidarts self-presentation, no self-seductions; he has no interest in transcendental mysticisms or moderate enchantments. He wants to feel himself recruited into something worthy. Now and then he suggests that it will have much to do with love, an addiction he has not found to be reliable. But his heart would seem rather to belong to art and the difficult process of creating meaning, often in bewilderment and horror. Unendingly,

he says, under/ everything, art, though he is forever unsure what art can provide by way of genuine revelation, confronted as it must ever be by the metaphysical/ awfulness of this incontinent/ body. There are poetsthink of Wallace Stevenswhose eyes remain, even in old age, bright and quick, poised to comprehend what Randall Jarrell once called the unspoilable delights, the inexhaustible interests of existence. Bidart, by contrast, is not inclined to see things in a plainly bright or steady way. He is a poet desperate for a glimpse, a taste, an intimation of what is not, cannot be and yet must be. At their best, his poems evoke a state of barely controllable panic, as if their speaker had been unaccountably seized by a thought or a fear he has no way to repel. The resulting self-interrogation leads him to attend relentlessly to what he calls the wound of being and to abide in a place where what is must forever be contested and remade. The burning/ fountain, he writes, is the imagination/ within us that ingests and by its/ devouring generates/ what is most antithetical to itself. For such a poet, perfect poise is no virtue and, in any case, is well out of reach. The urgencies central to Bidarts work are so especially punishing and exhilarating because of the stern geometry he invests in his poems. It is most apparent in the shorter lyric poems, where a deliberately stylized surface can just barely contain the raw emotion, as in the delicately tortured opening lines of Coat, from 2008: You, who never lied, lied about what you at every moment carried. Or one sees it again in the sestina If See No End In Is, also from 2008, where the double-bind is identified as in the end/ the figure for human life, so that What we love is precluded always by something else we love, as if each no we speak is yes, each yes no. The resignation in such lines is beautifully undercut by a peculiar torsion, an unease reflected in the forced compression of the utterance, the informing emotion set against any slightest implication of gratified release. In Metaphysical Dog, there is the same torsionlines tense with their own music, turned in on themselves, acutely attuned to their own internal vibrations, as in we who have seen what we see through his sight are his progeny, or what could not ever find a

james franco

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body/ because what you wanted, he/ wanted but did not want. Or this: In this journey through flesh/ not just in flesh or with flesh// but through it. Such formations defy the standard conventions of casual poetic utterance and vernacular slouch. Even where Bidart is most directCouples stay together when each of the two/ remains a necessity for the otherhe finds ways to complicate not alone the substance but the saying of the poem as a whole. The effect conveyed is of thought obstructed, emotion unresolved. The sense of breakthrough in Bidart has principally to do with the seethe and turbulence of what cannot be mastered, with the effort to perform in words a brilliant dream that is both visible and opaque. One fragmentary version of the dream surfaces in the first stanza of For an Unwritten Opera: Once you had a secret love: seeing even his photo, a window is flung open high in the airless edifice that is you. Another version of a related but different dream in part three of Whitman: Your gaze, Walt Whitman, through its mastery of paper paper on which you invented the illusion of your voice the intricacies of whose candor and ambition disarm me into imagining this is your voice fueled by the ruthless gaze that unshackled the chains shackling queer me in adolescence But then the work of performance and breakthrough in Bidart also involves the work of dredging and retrieval. Proust hoped to feel something start within me, as he put it, something that leaves its resting place and attempts to rise, something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth. That is also the great challenge, and the great mystery, at the heart of Bidarts work, which operateseven where it is telling a story, developing a character through an intricate series of plots and subplotsas if it were after something embedded like an anchor at a great depth. The mind charged with this urgent, impossible task is driven forward and yet never sure what it is after. However different their respective takes on the promise of retrieval, Proust does in effect speak for the poet when he confesses, I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can

hear the echo of great spaces traversed. Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss.

n Bidarts poems, the abyss often encompasses the fear of extinction, or the inability to believe in the durability of the poets inventions, or the sense that human beings in general are no match for the demons they carry within them. But Bidarts most authentic relation to the abyss, and to what Proust calls resistance, is more distinctive. It is one thing to observe that life resists us and our wishes, to noteas in an earlier Bidart poemthat the stratagems by which briefly you/ ameliorated, even seemingly/ untwisted what still twists within you were never going to work for long. But it is another thing entirely for the poet to proceed with the persistent/ sense that whatever object he seeks/ is not what he seeks, and more, that he will always demand from what he seeks that it offer maximal resistance to his demands. There is a sort of nobility in a stance so set against profit. Bidart has a fondness for words like imperious and antithetical. Resistance in him is a function of his hunger for what is most indigestible. He summons what mounts slowly in him only because he can sense that it will not

deliver what he craves. Necessity for Bidart is the cage he twists within, the cage of his own hunger for the absolute, which he can but barely comprehend. Resistance is thus not merely one element among many that he admires, but the quality in experiencein himselfabove all others that he thrills to and celebrates. Some readers may think such a disposition perverse, the mark of a psychological condition. But in truth, Bidarts brave, virulent investment in resistance results in work of extraordinary power. There is an impressively robust quality in an imagination so adept at subverting or contradicting its own hopes and desires, working perpetually against the grain of its own healthy wish to be at last fully accommodated. We see this in the way the poet handles the resources, conventions and strictures available to him, his radical experiments with line breaks and punctuation, his idiosyncratic use of capital letters and italics, what Tom Sleigh rightly refers to as his persistent stylistic disaffections. Consider, for example, that Bidart is awarehe must beof the objection of some modernists to abstraction and their insistence upon no ideas but in things. And yet he trades in abstraction with the intransigent determination of an artist perpetually making up the

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rules as he goes along, negotiating the terms of his own refusals and risks. In the same way, Bidart often blurs the line between poetry and prose, or swerves now and then into didacticism (the great secret of morals, the imagination to enter/ the skin of another), as if the general aversion to that accent were sufficient reason to take it on. Bidarts aesthetic has always banked on a resistance to fixed protocols. In some cases, this has extended to the poets refusal to remain within the compass of the idiom or posture that apparently shapes a poem, so that a narrative poem is made to resist its own apparent nature and to feed its own subversive tendency to become something else. In He Is Ava Gardner, a poem ostensibly built around the movie star is made to serve the very different purposes associated with a philosophic meditation on necessity, logic and the hunger for the absolute. Such

works do not conform to the easy standards of the experimental, an aesthetic in which risk may be taken without any prospect of genuine danger. Bidarts work is at once challenging and intimate. It courts excess and disorder with an unmistakable sense that it is possible for the poet to go wrong and thereby to betray his vocation. There is in Bidarts work the surprise we crave in art that matters, but we would never think to say about it what Clement Greenberg said of experimental art: that it is all surprise without satisfaction. Though Bidart is open to the lure of the arbitrary and absurd, there is in his nature a more strenuous commitment to inexorability. Resistance in his work is both principle and disposition. The song he sings and refashions is a matrix of tensions. In Metaphysical Dog, he shuttles fiercely between You did not repeat their lives and Or, you did repeat their lives,

between the desert and how/ cunningly you/ failed to elude love. The failure to be or to feel adequate is confronted by that which you once again fail/ not to hear, cannot erase or obliterate, which is the promise of some partially redemptive change of heart. But his poems typically resist even their own dominant urge to find a way into the absolute. They settle, with fierce misgiving, for private accommodations. The rage to escape what is felt to be oppressive, to achieve the souls true desire, blends in this brilliantly orchestrated book with the more humble task of repossessing the true self, a self occasionally sweet (as in Whitman, or the sweet lingo of OHara and Ashbery), more often skeptical, disabused, airless. The true self is inconceivable in Bidart, as Louise Glck noted, without damage and shame, which the poems do not triumph overand so, we may add, must n not hope to do without.

Exchange
(continued from page 2) Winston Churchill and John Nashacknowledged having mental disabilities. When we stereotype and marginalize people with psychiatric disabilities, we not only harm individuals, we also risk the collective loss of talent and insight that these people can contribute. This was done in the wake of the Newtown tragedy, with the resurrection of the long-debunked stereo type of people with mental disabilities as violent. We must not isolate and stigmatize those living with mental disabilities. Doing so only discourages them from seeking treatment, and from acknowledging their disability to family, friends and employers. Susan Mizner, Disability Counsel American Civil Liberties Union nersthrough state and federal laws that are unlikely to prevent another Newtown but would make it mandatory to report and database someone who has voluntarily hospitalized herself for, say, depression or anorexia. Its easy to blame a mad world on the mad, even though, as Susan Miner notes, those with mental illness are far more likely to be the targets of violence than its perpetrators. Yet the crass, uninformed rhetoric surrounding mental illness may hold one kernel of truth: that unquiet minds, are indeed different, and that to pretend that they are not is silly and counterproductive. There is a clear connection between bipolar disorder and creativity, particularly in music and the language arts (Kay Redfield Jamisons Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament is the seminal book on this topic). The trope of the mad genius is not just a romantic idealization. Serious, well-designed studies have demonstrated that people with bipolar disorder are overrepresented in work in the creative arts, as are their first-degree relatives. Temple Grandin has become an unbelievably successful advocate for the autistic mind and its value to society, and she has suggested that many of the great scientific minds of the past, present and future lie, as we now say, on the spectrum. The autism community has boldly suggested that mental disorders or illness may not represent pathology but rather neurodiversity. This sounds like a euphemism, but I believe they are right. There is ample evidence that in our society, which is still so enamored of that horrid corporate clich, thinking outside the box, there are many who think not just outside it but around and through and beyond it; for them, the box does not exist. This is not to diminish the struggles of those with mental illness. The defunding of asylums and hospitals in the last century was hailed by many as a liberation, but many of these institutions provided humane care and a stopgap against destitution. Now a great number of those with mental illness reside in prisons or on the streets, and those who can access basic mental healthcare often find themselves fobbed off with fifteen minutes of face time and a handful of very expensive pills. As for false authority, Archias knows nothing about my connection to mental illness professionally, personally or otherwise, but the question of who is qualified to understand mental illness has long been debated, rarely productively. Can the mad know their madness better than the sane? I think they can and often do, and that sanity is an unfortunately rare quality in modern America, even among the neurotypical. The radical form of sanity that so many with mental illness must cultivate in order to livedespite and because of their brushes with madnessis remarkable, and a wonder in a world where not much is. Miriam Markowitz

Markowitz Replies
New York City

Like Catherine Archias, I believe that in the future we will look back at this moment with shame and anger, or I hope we will, given the gross transgressions committed against those with mental illnessa population that is arguably the most powerless in the countryevery day, but especially right now, in the wake of last years series of mass shootings. Politicians on the both sides of the aisle have deflected responsibility for these tragedies by proposing new measures to identify the dangerously mentally illfuture Lanzas and Lough-