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Mattew Paris / Review: Brett Rutherford

Brett Rutherford has put one of his latest poems on Blogsport. It should call attention to this improbable man and singularity among us. Brett's work is available through his own Poets Press. His collections at their best offer some poems in the league of Wordsworth in their sublimity, of Alexander Pope in their wit. His subject matter is often the sensational and dark materials inaptly called Gothic we are very familiar with in Poe, Stoker, Lovecraft and classic horror movies. Most of them seem to very effective read aloud. They reach the sublime at times in great long poems like Fete but there's nothing dense or abstruse about his cellar and pellucid writing. They may take up a monologue of a character as Browning once did. They can offer a narrative that has clear propulsive force. Sometimes they are arch and comical. They are mostly set in places in America often either in New England or Pennsylvania.

Brett's repertory is hard to write about because it is at once like Browning's detached portraits both clear and refined yet occasionally ghoulishly conversational like the parlance of crypt keepers in ancient E-C comic books. It very much embeds itself in the traditions of supernatural in American prose and poetry. It can be savored in a variety of ways.

It is entertaining enough if one wants to be superficial in one's assay of his suave talents. It is profound if one cares to plumb the sense in Brett's poetry that the horrors and known attributes of the phenomena world are a sanguine island surrounded by much more unknowable worlds sometimes antically implied by the poet. The counterpoint of this philosophic elevation in his poetry is the idiosyncratic American touches that suggest oral conversation and more ordinary circumstances Much of the more ghoulish poetry is witty, even funny. One of the central jokes, how one reacts in banal ways to divine and ineluctable circumstances echoes similar runs of such wit by Kafka.

For poets focused on craft Brett's lines are almost never rhymed or metered in any traditional way. The narrative flow, phrases, images dictate the length and shape of its rhetoric. Everything orbits a clarion execution if its subject matter. In fact, its use of metaphor and simile is deliberately unobtrusive/ The feel of the poetry is achromatic/ it seems to be mounted in blacks, whites and greys. It's a subtle technique that aims to invoke the colloquial energies of prose but has plenty of metaphors and similes in its fluid mot jsute style. It's not obviously poetic in the way an anthem or a jingle is. It never departs from the natural syntax of a sentence to evoke a heavy formality... It never has the density or offers an abstruse phrase that makes one stop to wonder what hermetic insight he is pitching in a realm of murk.

How people define poetry varies from place to place. Free verse of this sort puts the emphasis on both startling images and a supple felicitous music that rhythmically toward asymmetry. We don't as yet have the science that can discern between what is inspired, what is a dead monument posturing as poetry in an emptiness. One of the less obvious elements of poetry is how it defines at least for the poet what seems to him to be important, what might be trivial, not worth a poem. Brett's choices of subject all reflect a presumption that circumstances of desperation and the haunting proximity of ultimate peril deserved more of his focus than what he nibbled on for lunch. One might ask in these piously secular times what the value of Gothic supernatural verse or prose might be. One certainly in my lifetime has heard the genre dismissed by savants as tawdry fare for decadents, trivial, gratuitously sensational escapist stuff. The value of this niche in literature if any is not taken up by Lovecraft in his study of the supernatural...

Plainly it is a kind of twisted mirror that reflects part of the materialist realms since Walpole, "Monk" Lewis and Maturin that in a saturnine way completes the world view of a species that really doesn't believe entirely in materialism. Just as Homer has his protagonists persecuted by truculent gods one needs an antagonist of a sufficiently fearsome character to make many a modern narrative interesting.

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Continued...Mattew Paris / Review: Brett Rutherford

Dracula is not about a vampire, a character about whom in Stoker's novel we know almost nothing, but a tale about the perils of the unknown worlds beyond materialism that the conventional Victorian Johnathon Harker has traveled to Transylvania to discover in spite of himself. Stephan King sets his novels in the same cozy area of New England but gives them a set if nemeses that intrigue us as much as the lack of them in other novels merely about the victims of a monster might inspire us with a vague tedium. Brett's verse is about such desperate entities and people.

Brett has a range that demands different sets of critical filters for his varied intents. Some poems aren't aiming for the rapture of Longinus but the cool analytical effects in some of Poe's tales. His verse is all in some way reliably amusing. I would say some of it is in a league with any great verse written in English. It is that good. Brett particularly evokes the sublime in way that Wordsworth would have admired. He has turned out a singualr achievement. It buys in a novel and attractive way into the covert dread our species has of the unknown and knowable that hasn't yet been banished by our parade of amusements.

Since our aesthetics is rather weak on the value of anything it also might be important to say that Brett's verse stakes out territory not every quite respectable in priggish circles but a major element in American writing: the world of the occult, ghosts, monsters, the margins of the knowable. From Poe to Stephan King we have some great writers who have worked that sort of material into not a celebration of terror and gore but a call to honor an invisible world, a general sense in a materialistic society of somewhat narrow notions of what thought is legitimate that the price of such an embrace of a perhaps imaginary coterie among us of measure is a covert dread of all the subjects that Brett has in his verse.

It's not just the stuff of the supernatural but war and general decay that creeps into everything. Brett's poetry completes half of a generic human experience that has one foot in the secular and would like to have both feet there. This is not to say that anything in Brett's verse is ther than sculpted, lapidary, refined, even when it is in passing moments idiosyncratically conversational. It's easy to miss how good he is because he is discreet about his effects in a way let us say Milton is not. The only overtly dramatic element in some of them is its last few lines that cap his material with a brief emotional peroration and focus. The witty counterpoint and comic turns in the midst of some account of nacreous phenomena might remind one of similar etudes by ghoulish humor by Ambrose Bierce. It's hard to think of anyone else who is at once no niggardly offered of horror and as funny.

One should add to this gratuitous laud that Brett in person is very much the man who wrote these sui generis poems, plus has all sorts of polymath qualities and gifts as an autodidact that make him a singularity in this country. Currently living in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh after some long time residence in New York and Lovecraft country like Providence, he speaks and writes in several languages including Russian, is an expert on classical music, a composer, an authority om Peking opera, a master gourmet feaster and a scholar of Chinese history.

Brett among his myriad excellence also has organizing and leadership qualities; in his way he is a politician if his politics is to offer the world the equivocal values of an optimal consciousness. If those virtue weren't enough of a range, he has made his living as a computer expert, printer, and maker of beautiful books. As a publisher he particularly has been the champion of another great poet: Barbara Holland. He actually appreciates other people. There really isn't anyone else quite like him.

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Lehman Weichselbaum: Hot Mike

Matthew Paris: THE Blog Bog

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