Fires Seen from Space

By Betsy Fagin

Winter Editions 2024

 

Poetry died in the twentieth century, and it wasn’t schoolteachers, politicians, or television that killed it. Poets did. Decades on, they continue to stab at its inky, lettered corpse.

For most of human history (maybe for most of human prehistory, too), poetry was practically mother’s milk. It was the genre. For a long, long time, poets were beloved, and it wasn’t uncommon for one to achieve the stature of a national hero.

But poetry’s dead now. And a good many poets seem happy it’s dead. Why? Freedom from expectation, freedom from accountability, can make for an easy ride. Like the abstract artist who has zero conception of composition, the self-defined poet of our age is a poet simply because he says he is. If he reads poetry—tradition be damned—it’s that of his peers. In more and more cases, however, he reads nothing at all. It’s a bleak picture, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. The solution, actually, is simple. Poets need to write poems for people.

It’s unfortunate, then, that poet Besty Fagin’s new book, Fires Seen from Space, her third volume of poems, does very little to repair the damage. This isn’t a little ironic, either, given the book’s apparent dedication to saying something meaningful about some of our biggest, most urgent bugbears: climate change, the destruction of the planet, political apathy, racism, and police brutality. The reader’s ability to identify these themes, mind you, relies almost exclusively on a familiarity with the keywords. And while poems have always been happy to grapple with themes like these, and though readers have sometimes been asked to grapple with the poems themselves (as the poems grapple with their subjects), here, it seems it’s only the reader who’s doing the grappling.

Most of Fagin’s poems puzzle, and not in a good way. They are (as the poet Tony Hoagland would have put it) “skittery”—elusive, not allusive. Pick any poem from the middle of the book, say, “Every planet we reach is dead,” and you run into lines like these:

 

a sane sky knows no rank

here everyone can win

 

circling status

peregrine

 

sexual blurring

haunted bounty

 

herds of fortune cloud

winter sister to her tired

 

of weighing racial mixture

part foreign soils

 

and so forth.

 

Such a poem offers a bounty of images, but their arrangements lack pattern. A patternless poem has no ground, and with no ground it has no grounds for pretending to say anything at all. You could drop an anvil into this poem and the anvil would float.

The poems are grouped into sections, under headers like “All so sun (Book 1),” “Beauty is established,” and “Movement theory.” Each section offers variations on a theme. Figuring out what these themes happen to be is, again, mostly a matter of identifying words and phrases that catch on whatever sentiment is conveyed by the section title. The fifth section, “Resistance is beautiful,” contains poems, probably, about resistance: political poems, changemaking poems. But who really knows?

It’s true that most of Fagin’s poems supply no more than an interface for the barest register of ideas. But you wouldn’t know this from the get-go. The first poem in the collection, “Chapter 1,” does offer a semblance of sense. Here are its first two stanzas.

 

Did they remember

how one spectacle

took on so much lasting?

In memory forever as

a satisfied certainty?

An increase in discomfort

 

is what flattened the earth.

Algorithms outmatched

previously known comforts.

Certainty cares nothing

for you or your playlists.

Suspicion holds stories together.

 

Here are lines, finally, that actually scan for rhythm: it’s a halting, no-nonsense kind of rhythm, but that’s going to be appropriate to the poem’s task. Its first lines concoct a haze of impossible questions, but even these gradually resolve into something recognizable (a bit terrifying, at that): our very own world, unsparingly segmented by a speaker who, in all her justified righteousness, gathers the damning evidence of a fallen, technological empire. “Suspicion holds stories together” is a sly line, too, delivered in a kind of artful double-speak that sends up conspiratorial thinking and poetry itself by confounding their essential natures (that is, offering cogent interpretations of the world by noticing what happens at the margins).

 

The poem continues for another three sestets, and it’s remarkably readable. But it operates as something of a false front: from “Chapter 2” onward, Fires Seen from Space becomes a gradually corrosive, entropic thing. Not until the book’s final section (fittingly titled “All so sun (Book 2),” the first one’s twin) will the reader be availed of anything approaching legibility. If the first and final sections offer glimpses of intact galaxies, then the long middle of this slim volume is nebulous at best. To call this stuff “impressionistic” would be far too generous: the daubs do not cohere.

 

 

 

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.