Routine Disruptions

A various, campy, never-tiring display of verbal skyrockets and sweet, soap opera dilemmas, Elmslie's oeuvre makes for joyous reading. Among many books and projects, here culled by journeyman publisher Bamberger, Elmslie's musical The Glass Harp hit Broadway at the time an early book of poems, Album, was published in 1969. There and elsewhere, we find him employing the all-embracing urbane surrealism, spontaneity and wit of the New York School to create poems suffused with the flux of bourgeois vacuity, social marginality, and merciless sexual ambitions. Witness selections from ""Panopticon for Calamity Winifred"": ""Twister Bea's asparagus wobble suffused the maw of August dusk,/ rancid from wetsuits, yahoos in spa pools dunked..../ Formulaic, yeah,/ but the promised porn classics got born again last Ozzie & Harriet day/ as virgin surf foam, components a-swirl."" Other poems (such as the title poem) attempt a meditational stance, suggesting hurt depths beneath the play. Elmslie's near-paranoiac verbal inventiveness--intrusive in some of the more serious-minded poems--is let rip in the formally loose songs from his plays, as when he has the character Lavinia Clone sing: ""I'm terrible at games,/ Always lose at Parchesi./ Stupid at names./ Saint Who of Assissi?"" in ""Schlock `n' Sleaze R&B."" Few poets deserve as much of the attention they crave (""Yes, it's a small world I live in"") as does Elmslie--he gives poetic narcissism a good name--and few manage to sustain his excess, scale and abundance while remaining so thoroughly poised. (Sept.)