Review: Josh Bell's No Planets Strike (2004)

         for Jordan Davis

Josh Bell knows how to be gritty without sounding resigned or world-weary; he manages to convey attitude without being needlessly ironic. In his No Planets Strike, there is, in each poem, an abiding hope of salvation which renders the narrator's occasional aggressive posturing charmingly defensive--an entirely empathetic mechanism--rather than churlish or off-putting.

While Bell's poetry implicates and employs a healthy suspicion of certain fundamental constructions--love, progress, loss, hope--it also transcends these entirely humane skepticisms by not being (as one might otherwise fear) misanthropic, a flaw of much contemporary poetry which abuses eternal themes by deploying not merely a sense of entitlement-in-rebellion, not merely irreverence, but a sort of primal nastiness often composed of little more than snickering diction and spitefully coy wordplay. There's none of that in No Planets Strike.

Instead, one finds with Bell that, even if his narrator is sour enough to describe people (as seen from a great height) as "flannel tongues inching, mouthless," ("The Beautiful American Poem"), he's also forgiving enough to follow that observation--as a lover of men hopes it will be followed--with "I'll quit talking of people as tongues and rivers as brown, / flashing legs, and I'll quit talking if you put your fingers to my lips," an artful bit of misdirection which reminds us that the point of all this worldly sanctimony is togetherness: not, perhaps, in so naive a permutation as that proposed by The Youngbloods in 1967, but something approaching a godliness of the earthly variety. So: emotionally, there's consistently a powerful volta, both strophe and antistrophe, in Bell's work, a hallmark of writing which aims not merely to entertain but to instruct.

And yet the cleverness of Bell's No Planets Strike is that it never stoops to didacticism; I admire, for instance, the effortlessness of poems which, while presupposing myth, nevertheless tell us something devoutly true about modern modes of story-telling--the oldest Art--as well. I think, for instance, of "Sleeping With Artemis" (a stunning exemplar of this type of poem), which would be the sort of euphemistic evasion so-called "purists" detest did not Bell end the piece with, "But something about her was perfect." Just so, it is not that the perfect gloss of modern life conceals our rot, but that, as Bell would have it, the rot compels us--impels us--to go diving for that brand of perfection which neither comes nor goes across epochs but which is abiding and persistent. Some believe it is the labor of poetry to expel this brand of perfection from its distant hiding places and allow it, instead, to float on the surface of the narrator's (and reader's) consciousness: Bell labors in this field and labors productively.

It is not surprising, then, that the supernatural is a common enough feature of Bell's work; what is surprising, however--or better stated, is not surprising in a talented poet like Bell, but is always refreshing--is his ability to talk to and about and around the concept of God without being, on the one hand, facetious and patronizing, or, on the other, morbid and dogmatic. Bell locates God squarely in the same metaphysical space he locates Artemis, a look-touch-and-feel landscape which is at once Old Testament and Happy Hunting Grounds. It is difficult not to admire the inclusiveness of this sort of tactile theology, which is simultaneously reverent and irreverent, often within the bounds of the same line (e.g., "the vestigial nipples of our Lord," from "A Meditation Concerning What You Might Be Meditating About, Ramona").

Bell is a myth-maker who knows how to "move the river to fit you" ("A Meditation Concerning..."), in other words, to deploy the ethereal and the supernatural and the spiritual and the metaphysical to ends entirely pragmatic, that is, an expression of self which encompasses and presupposes--in fact approaches and desires and requires--all that is not the self. To this end Bell exploits not merely his dynamic and whimsical use of language and image and tone, but also his command of rhythm. Indeed, Bell's free-verse rhythms are impeccable, variously campfire and revival-tent and psalmist; frankly, it seems that few beyond Bell (and some old masters whose bite is now prettier than even their bark) value all this Whitmanesque shit anymore, and more's the pity. For instance, while a poet like Dean Young may allow surreal turns in his poetry, few of those turns are as warm-blooded as those in No Planets Strike; even the simply absurdist departures of poems like "My Week As a Pornographic Film Queen" express a desire to be good ("Buy me / a pretty white hat and buy me / another pretty white hat").

Few poets whose work is as occasionally edgy as Bell's are willing to also allow for the continued possibility of wonder therein; Bell's a standout here as well (from "Dear Song": "We looked up at the stars. Then we looked up at the stars. / White, tiny, smart, vicious, the stars, the stars, the stars"). It is no hyperbole to categorize Bell's work--at least as seen in No Planets Strike--as "galactic confessionals" of a sort: not domestic, not domesticated, not quarantined, not doughty, not noncommittal. But then, as noted above, they're not preachy, either--they "zero in on the whatsit" ("Zombie Sunday [The Dear Reader Version]") through triangulation, and not via pronouncement (indeed, Bell treats his reader to not one, not two, not three--but in fact nine--distinct renditions of his poem "Zombie Sunday"; it's hard not to respect a poetry which is so palpably in a constant state of emotional/psychological as well as structural/conceptual renewal and revision). Bell "zeroes in on the whatsit" without commanding compliance or complicity from his reader--just the sort of gentle non-invite which most avaricious readers of poetry take as almost an exhortation to read further.

The poems of No Planets Strike, like Whitman's "Song of Myself"--to which the former owe a distant yet cognizable debt--happen everywhere at once: they are neither mere intellectual exercises (i.e., spaceless) nor anecdotal (i.e., slavishly beholden to space/time). Just so, Bell's narrator is neither (in this, again, like Whitman) at the beginning nor the end of any specific experience in No Planets Strike but rather plays--and this really is rather the right word here--all along the in-between: that middle distance which is not merely now but now-now, the emphatic Whitmanesque "Now." As noted in "Poem to Line My Casket With, Ramona," "There's a difference between a white dress and the white dress." Bell maintains that sense of urgency not quietly but with the marked dignity of what one might call "considered exuberance." Bell's poems exist at the intersection of love and insanity, nostalgia and oblivion. These are poems not merely literally about, say, zombies, but in a much broader sense benign decomposition: not of language (Bell is, fortunately, not quite so coy as that) but emotion. And as such they're adventurous and sublime and chaotic and true all at once--and not the hard-won truth of anecdotal experience or spiritual awakening, either; not the narrow, flea-bitten truths of workaday ironies and wicked wordplay; but the truth of small explosions, barely yet imperceptibly and beautifully contained in the bounds of the printed page.

Buy this book.

No, seriously.