I must begin by declaiming. I am not un-biased. I have every reason in the world to wax prosaic on Octagon, Commonweal, a book-length poem by Michael Sweeney. I read it in rough installments as it was gestating. I scribbled upon it in its section-at-a-time white sheets stages. Sweeney and I share in common our middle-aged, Irish-American working class backgrounds. We are poetry grad school chums. We're both bookish and throwback. Did I saw we're Irish? So very Irish. I feel like the book's godmother. There's a section of "Octagon" devoted to my uterus.
Is not a womb not a fighting cage of sorts?
There are reasons not to boost this book too. It's been out a while (2013) Reading it demands a leap of faith. It's dense and poetic with a capital "P." There's a lot of sports in it. The guy who published it is a grifter and thief. But, disclaimer unfurled, I must say I can not bear to take this book off the top of my desk and retire it to a book-case. I have been rereading it for years. Epic poetry bears repeating.
I suppose the literary experts would say Octagon Commonweal is not technically an epic poem. It's not long enough. You can't scan it. But I think it is an epic poem. I think there I hear an unofficial metrical system of marching feet at work when I hear it. It's not dactylic hexameter but it's the contemporary American English cousin, somehow, of that. Via Octagon, Commonweal, Sweeney gives us a heroic line for the contemporary age. The contemporary age of heroism lost, perhaps. Or not. One hopes not.
The “Octagon,” a fighting cage, serves as a perfect totem for all things greed-based, hawkish, false, and Kardashian. Sweeney’s poem is a sprawling song of war. What side are we on as we read Octagon Commonweal? The side of the the compassionate, the cogitators, inventors, the noble inquisitors. Not the God side but the soul side.
Octagon Commonweal does not look or sound like other contemporary poems. In part because it is epic. In part because it darts into terrain political. You know quite immediately when you read Octagon Commonweal that you are reading the work of a learned poet who declines to shrink from addressing, in verse, history in the making.
It may be that one of the first orders of business any poem has as it starts out is to invent the form it needs to inhabit. Architect Louis Sullivan's "form follows function" applies. What makes The Iliad a poem and not just a good story, is, to say it very simply, its that it is/was expressed in its ideal poetic form. It's a song with marching feet and a breakable, racing heart. Individual words, even in the original, don't (aim to) do the kind of work words (in English) in a poem by Marianne Moore would do. In a poem by Wallace Steven, every line and word, in a sense, fictions as a poem nested in its larger poem.
In the case of epic, the structure accommodates the poem's calling and ambition. The form follows the line of its jab. "Octagon" could have gone on for another three hundred pages--I know because I remember when Sweeney stopped (and went on to his next book-length poem!). He could certainly have wrangled the Octagon Commonweal his syllables into dactylic hexameter, but in 2013--when the book came out--nor now--that would not have flown. Flying another way is called for.
One of the poem's/book's greatest strengths is that Octagon Commonweal manages to traffic in erudition without being academic. There’s an expansiveness in all of Sweeney's work that springs from working class, quasi-autodidact sensibility uncut by an excess of scholarship. The erudition is there, but Sweeney keeps that in a lesser cage for the sake of the greater cage. I recognize that calling a poem "lyrical" can be a kind of kiss of death nowadays but what else does one call the singing aspect picked up in Irish Catholic Boston at the feet of naturally musical Irish relations?
In "Octagon" Sweeney is entirely experimental when it comes to texture and form, but he strains to incorporate what came before (in the western tradition into which he was born). He toes the line between then and now, but most of his weight is in tomorrow. He comes from Anglophone men of the canon. He goes to the deep song of world, to the imprisoned, to the under-sung, under-heeded.
Octagon Commonweal is spectacular. It's about war. Not one war--though mention of wars we know are made in the poem. The central bout of Octagon Commonweal is the fight for the great light hope of wisdom, compassion--not God--but soul. The book, like so many books I read of late, puts me in mind of the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. How do we preserve enlightenment in a world hellbent on the wrong kinds of advancement. Sweeney projects intellectual and spiritual devolution on a paint-chipping wall. What side are we on? Not our own it would seem.
What does the poem of that strife look like? It looks pretty gorgeous actually. The thrilling part is that as one turns the corner round Sweeney's his enjambment bends, one is never quite sure
whether an unofficial ode to a brother, teacher or friend; a nugget of political commentary theory or an analysis of the physics of a Boston Celtics’ jump shot will knock you out with loveliness. You just don’t know because epic is dense and shepherds everything in and Sweeney is far too artful to ever telegraph a punch.
Long poems can’t maintain the-every-syllable-counts fidelity readers have come to expect and admire in short contemporary poems, but one of of the many beauties of Octagon Commonweal is that the poet comes close. Not a syllable is wasted. Furthermore, it may be that Octagon Commonweal is as much designed for our listening pleasure as for the page, which is, of course, in keeping with the epic tradition it aims to venerate, reinvent and uphold. A heavyweight’s knowledge of the English literature canon winds through the text. In Octagon Commonweal you hear strains of a singer, the near-raging admonitions of a gentle giant, and Blarney-free Irish magic. You hear a confessional poet processing love and fear through poems in a generous form. You hear the generosity of a careful poet.
You also hear a poet who takes what poet Allen Ginsberg (in his role as teacher, who "never flinched inside the octagon") called “the expansive heroic line” and infuses it with melopoeia. “The expansive heroic line” opens as it marches, barges unafraid into history as it is happening. Full of breath, it beats a drum, narrates, orates, impresses all possible vividness into the service of what was the poet's occupation/ vocation long before printed books and newspapers existed.
Rumsfeld heard the power chords of Gotterdammerung at the Pentagon octagon
Once you're in the octagon you can't smell the gasoline...
We must evolve as human beings out of the three-point stance
& take down the octagon...
Octagon Commonweal poses and answers these questions: Are heroic epics even possible in the United States of 2015?” If yes, what then is a hero? Who are the good guys? What is a triumph? What does that heroic line sound like? Can poetry still get there from here? How to sing the horrors immediate like a wise orator and not like an arid pedant?
I have never seen a poem that reminds me of Commonweal Octagon. That alone is probably a good reason to crack it open.
Buy In Memory of the Fast Break by Michael Sweeney, Plain View Press on Amazon
Buy Octagon, Commonweal on Amazon