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Craig Challender's Familiar Things, Linwood Publishers, 1998
Joel Peckham
--originally published in the Summer, 1999 issue of the Prairie Schooner
Over the last two decades there has been a great deal said about the mediocrity of Contemporary American Poetry. The argument has been that the workshop system has produced a kind of professional poet who, politically correct and culturally sensitized, is able to produce and continually reproduce a slick but bloodless poetry that has nothing particularly bad in it, but nothing ambitious or challenging in it either. I believe, however, that this view in its attempt to be comprehensive, has the flaw of being ironically myopic. Even if we grant that the larger presses are hesitant to print poems that take risks in form and content (and recent books by Dave Smith, Ellen Bryant Voigt and Hayden Carruth would contradict the charge) , many of the smaller presses such as Alice James Books, The White Eagle Coffee Store Press, Chantry Press, Portals Press, and Linwood Publishers are turning out startlingly original, even dangerous, volumes that while often uneven and flawed, are also raw in the best sense--the way a cut or scrape makes the body raw, sensitizing the skin to the air.
Craig Challender's Familiar Things is such a book. Split into three sections, the volume is built around a long, sequenced poem about a large Midwestern family disrupted by the birth of a child with Downs Syndrome. But the purpose of this book is not to make the readers better people by making them more aware of the difficulties of parenting such a child. The birth of this child is like a bomb detonating a mine field. As each persona speaks to the reader and to each other, we are given voyeuristic access into the dark places of the human psyche. The speakers, though often loving toward this child and toward each other are refreshingly flawed--self-absorbed, often insensitive, and given to fits of grotesque reverie. In the opening poem, for example, the child's father refers to her as "the last of the litter, some would / say the least. That's bleak but no bleaker than this / weather . . . ." The earthy brutality of the father's willingness to refer to his daughter as if she were a runt pig, coupled with his dismissing of the comparison as "no bleaker" than the weather immediately sets the troubling, sardonic, mood of the volume. The poem also explores the strained tenderness this father feels toward his daughter through his fascination with her and through her mere presence on the tractor with him as he plows the field. The vacillation between disgust and tenderness that each character feels toward this girl is reflected in different ways by each of the other family members.
This reflection and refraction of sensibility around a single figure is one of the great strengths of the volume. As the poems progress, they deepen, drawing strength from each other, even as the family members fail to do so. And their failure adds a powerful tragic sense to the book that one does not see very often in American poetry any longer. Clearly, no family could be less prepared to deal with this event than these toughened Midwesterners. The rough play of the children results in physical injuries to the daughter and when she loses a tooth the brother's response is telling: "she looks as if I'd hit her, which I guess / I did--mouth open, an expression of dumb pain, which was exactly what I'd felt. �And any way,' I said, leaning closer, / �You know these retards have no sense of balance.'" Imagine the Compsons or the Sartoris lifted and placed in South Dakota and you will have a good feel for this family unit.
Indeed, there is a great deal of Faulkner in this collection--in the manner of the telling, with each family member taking up a tale at different points and changing it in accordance with their own purposes, in the content with its focus on the retarded child or on the dissenterring of a dead father, and in the imagery with its reliance on rust, barbed wire, dust, and dirt. There is some of Frost's severity in the narrator's stance as well. And it is not surprising that this poet's work is actually read and referred to by several of the characters. In a sense calling forth Frost and Faulkner is a risk in and of itself. One would think that such literary presences would overwhelm the book, forcing the reader to make comparisons that could only be to this author's disadvantage. But I think, by drawing from these two very different voices, Challender has fashioned something distinct here, something altogether fresh and dramatically tensile. Where Frost's characters are flawed by their inability to communicate, Challender's are damaged by their inability to be anything but brutally blunt. Where Faulkner's speakers are haunted by history, Challender's are troubled, scarred, by personal guilt and familial responsibility. And the craft of the poems manages a nice tension between Faulkner's stream of consciousness rantings and Frost's ferocious restraint. It is difficult to select a single piece as an example but the final stanza in the final soliloquy "Jake", will have to do:
. . . I'm back where I belong. The white
stink of pills is gone, just smell upon smell
of trees, air, earth. Clear as water
he rises, big, bigger than ever.
Voices breathe in and out: Now
Now and Jenny squeezes my hand. I see shot
seed his chest, bloodwash, hear his cry
shake stones, tremble the moon. And I
sing too: Father. I'll bring you back. Father
There is much powerful, dramatic writing here. Even without a basic knowledge of the speaker's dilemma--his obsession with his own dead, cruel father--a reader can pick up on the dramatic power and strange, psychological wildness of this poem. Of course no-one could ever speak this way, and yet in the brutal, dreamlike world of Challender's it is possible and it rings true. Challender understands how our dead and our dying haunt us, how the past has an immediate and physical effect on the present--especially for those who feel personal guilt and who feel they can't avoid their responsibility for that past. And he brings this understanding to the page here with an economical clarity and concision that is really remarkable in its ability to sound fresh, to approach surrealism without losing focus, to leave us breathless.
I am not arguing that Craig Challender is on a level with Faulkner and Frost. There are flaws in this volume, places where the metaphors and similes risk cliche, where a false sentimentality creeps in, and where an individual voice breaks down, vacillating between academic and colloquial speech. But the best poems of this volume are good as any I have read by a new poet. The work is not fully polished yet, but I wonder if even that is really a criticism. In a time of so much refined and sometimes numbing professionalism, young poets might do well to return to the deliberate crudities of say, a Robert Penn Warren or even a James Dickey--crudities that stop readers, forcing them to pay attention. Too much polish can sometimes obscure the grain in the wood, or at least detract from its natural qualities. And Challender's is a grainy, gritty poetry, that while often crude is also undeniably powerful. This is a book that troubles your dreams, that won't let you sleep. Read it.