The Broken String by Grace Schulman

The Broken String Reviews

• 
  M. D. Hudson

  If you ever wanted to know what would've happened had Sylvia Plath not killed herself and instead moved back to the USA and sold out to the American Poetry Establishment by becoming an academic, read Grace Schulman's poems in The Broken String and read the flap copy. Plath and Schulman are contemporaries (born 1932 and 1935). Both come from "professional" backgrounds (Plath's dad was a entomologist/professor; Schulman's a NYC lawyer). Both eschewed work at fancy ladies' magazines. So Grace Schulman might be Plath's well-adjusted, career-minded doppelganger - that is if Plath had a 70% reduction in talent and had managed to shed that pesky lacerating self-awareness and pure literary ambition that does so keep poets up at night.
  
  Ah, but things look so good here, in the twilight of a successful late culturally-plugged-in career: The Broken String is a beautifully printed cloth-bound tax write-off from Houghton Mifflin. The poems within originally appeared in America's finest literary journals - Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, Sewanee Review, Western Humanities Review, etc. etc. One of them, "Headstones" received the American Scholar Award for Best Poem of 2004 (ah, that wonderful year for American poetry, 2004). Schulman's poems are lush, over-written but never overwrought, full of minutely, yet off-the-shelf nature observations and teensy-weensy epiphanies of the polite sort; you might confuse them with some of Plath's minor, mid-career work if you weren't paying attention. Ariel clomping along on the bridal path, the Zookeeper's wife on Zoloft, these are comfy little poems, the readers being, I'm guessing, those folks who buy things from advertisements in the back of the New Yorker - trousers with fifteen cunning pockets to thwart the pickpockets of the Iberian Peninsula, genuine berets from Brittany, Patagonian goat cheese delivered right to your door, NPR playing in the background. This book, eleven years old as I type this, is an artefact from an east coast literary milieu that is fading from the scene, not with a bang, but with a pensive stroll while
  
  "Cold rain falls slant against a cupola,
  drenches the greenmarket, mists windowpanes,
  and in slow tempo wire-brushes umbrellas,
  falling in buckets sent to mop us clean..." (p. 49).
  
  Lush, thoughtful without doing much actual thinking, the writing has an automatic quality, with birds and rain and classical music and Monet and museums being shifted around from poem to poem as cultural/spiritual signifiers. You can almost see those (gray, bald) heads nodding and murmuring in the auditorium throughout her reading.
  
  The first (and the collection's title) poem starts like this:
  
  The Broken String
  
  1
  
  When Itzhak Perlman raised his violin
  and felt the string snap, he sank and looked down
  at legs unfit to stand and cross the stage
  for a replacement. He bowed to the maestro,
  played radiant chords, and finished the concerto
  
  with the string he had. Rage forced low notes
  as this surf crashes on rock, turns, and lifts.
  Later, he smiled and said it's what you do:
  not just play the score, but make new music
  with what you have, then with what you have left. (p. 3)
  
  Oh dear, poor Itzhak Perlman worked over by the slow, grinding jaws of an Important American Poet. At first glance these stanzas are a tribute to art and the artist's triumph over adversity, which is a beautiful, worthy, etc. thing to write about. And yet how predictable it all seems, an exercise in Cultural Cliché - I mean, it is said that Paganini used to damage his strings deliberately so that they would break during his performances in order to demonstrate his prowess. So this whole broken-string fiddler scenario seemed a bit strained ("Rage forced low notes"), it not being an enormous impediment for a good violinist to carry on under these circumstances. The "unfit to stand" part seems designed to ramp up the trauma here (Perlman walks with crutches and braces, from childhood polio). "Radiant chords" is the sort of thing that, as the reader will soon find out, Schulman resorts too when a sound or a scene becomes too overwhelming to bother trying to find the right words. The "with what you have left" is an echo of Elizabeth Bishop's famous "One Art" ("the art of losing...") but instead of terror and perseverance you get an anecdote for the summer season ticket-holder crowd. The next section goes like this:
  
  2
  
  "What you have left: Bill Evans at the keyboard,
  Porgy. The sound rose, but one note, unworthy,
  stalled in his head above the weightless chords,
  above the bass, the trumpet's holler: Porgy.
  A sudden clenched fist rose, pounded the keys,
  
  fell limp: a heroin shot had hit a nerve.
  I Loves You, Porgy. Sundays at the Vanguard
  he soloed, improvised -- his test that starved
  nameless fear. Hands pitted against each other,
  like the sea's crosscurrents, played away anger" (ibid).
  
  I had to look this up, my knowledge of jazz being rudimentary if that: Bill Evans, jazz pianist, died of drug addiction complications, hepatitis, etc. (Wikipedia). But did I really need to look this up? Jazz guy, heroin, that "nameless fear"? Lordy, Porgy, I feel this came out of the bottom of a cereal box, a jazz guy collector card. Schulman, apparently unaffected by the fact that it is really, really, really hard to write about music (like "dancing about architecture" somebody once said), rattles off "the sound rose" and "weightless chords" and the "trumpet's holler." That "heroin shot had hit a nerve" sounds as if it were written by somebody who's never done any actual heroin.
  
  The final stanza is about her father at the piano, deaf, playing classical favorites until:
  
  "...One day I gasped, for there were runs
  
  he never heard, played as a broken kite string
  launches a lifelike eagle that might soar
  on what the flier holds, what he has left.
  Not even winds that howl along these shores
  and raise the surf can ever ground that flight." (p. 4)
  
  The broken strings of our life - but how does a broken kite string "launch" anything? Everything is so tied up here, as if with a metaphorical string. Yes, I get it - but again, Bishop did it better, without chewing up the scenery, resorting to wind and surf in a sketchy, off-hand way. Sometimes I wonder if King Neptune will initiate a lawsuit against bad poets for grossly misrepresenting the ocean - here, winds that howl along the shore not able to ground a broken-stringed kite flight. "Oh yeah?" says Neptune, whipping up another hurricane.
  
  
  ***
  
  But let's do some more jazz, hep cat. Here, we have autobiographical accounts of encounters with Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane and these encounters are so...expected, so galumphingly tenderly rendered. Apparently Schulman is known for her jazz poems - I base this on the existence of a collection called The Jazz Poems of Grace Schulman. Oh man, I just don't get most jazz (and I played in our high school jazz band, third cornet, atrociously) but I really, really don't get jazz poems. Years ago I attended a writers' conference in which jazz poems were the featured attraction and I was so bewildered, and yet so annoyed - from what I could tell, jazz poems go one of two ways - the poet tries to "do" jazz - improvisation via a kind of clunky scat-singing on the page. Or they do jazz scenarios - smoky bars with the lights down low, cigarette butts like little vandalized tombstones or whatever in the ashtrays. Either way the result is dispiriting, deadening, and very, very square - the opposite of what jazz music is supposed to be, so I assume. In her poems, Schulman usually takes the smoky jazz scenario approach:
  
  Thelonious Himself
  
  They came back new each night: thumps, craggy runs,
  one-finger jabs at keys that were hot pans.
  Heel dug in wood, soles flapping like seals,
  he stabbed notes that seemed wrong until they soared,
  
  all ragged beauty. Just twenty-five, I envied
  his starry reach, the risk to play it real.
  At the slick magazine, the risk was only
  no risk. I stabbed a lukewarm keyboard,
  
  hard prose about airy tulle. Form meant neat,
  no dissonance. Once I was tapped to herd
  Ten Best-Dressed College Girls to hear the Monk
  in a cafe on St. Marks Place. Not bad.
  
  Now there was neatness. Strict as shorebirds grouping
  they filed in, breadknife heels clacking in tempo;
  strangled waits, sleek heads acclaiming finish.
  Ten S-shapes, twenty legs Monk ogled through
  
  dark glasses, bamboo frames. He didn't sneer
  at their clatter. No, while the sax wailed, solo,
  Monk stood tall and swayed forward, unmistakably
  davening, moved by some unseen beauty.
  
  Suddenly he snapped fingers as though
  to shape pain into order. That was form.
  And all was void, as before Creation,
  and there was light. I left the job next day." (p. 20)
  
  The first stanza is, I can only surmise, an effort to "sound" jazzy. There are moments of surprise or bafflement (which is better than boredom) - the soles flapping like seals - but the whole shebang is so off-kilter I was mostly just baffled in a low-grade, annoyed way - the way I get listening to a lot of jazz, in fact. A minor complaint perhaps, but I suspect stabbing the "lukewarm keyboard" is an anachronism - maybe I'm wrong here, but in c. 1960 (when this must've taken place) people did type on the keyboards of typewriters, but the apparatus itself was referred to as a typewriter, not a keyboard, which is computer-age lingo for that separate thing tethered to your computer tower (I wasn't born in 1960, but this was still the lingo in 1980 when I was in typing class in high school). Davening is a Jewish term "to recite prescribed liturgical prayers" and I am not sure what it is doing here - Monk seems to be doing the opposite of davening, a jazz solo being the opposite of anything "prescribed"?
  
  There are some virtues here, of a kind of watered-down Plath sort - I loved aspects of the fourth stanza - those "breadknife heels" especially. But Schulman cannot, or doesn't bother to, keep up that level of writing - things peter out with Monk "moved by some unseen beauty." I also bet he was "moved" by the "S-shapes" of those Ten Best-Dressed College Girls. Hubba hubba! Can't we just be real? At least Monk ogled the girls - but unfortunately the sax "wailed." Which is to say that things get worse with the music, shaping pain into order, and some void before Creation - all the usual things squares say about jazz get said - jazz, shaping "pain into order" since 1910...spray it don't say it, man.
  
  
  ***
  
  I didn't read this entire collection - not even close. Thumbing through it, I found these bits, more music drifting skyward and other music stuff, and gauzy nature treatments, blurring together like every bad painting in every hotel room you've ever stayed in:
  
  "The lines I want are on the mezzo's pages
  tonight, when she unlooses a Bach aria
  to drift skyward: Erbarme dich, have mercy,
  and when the chorus stands, sorrow and rage
  
  in counterpoint, cross-rhythms, harmonies... (p. 42)
  
  ***
  
  "First day of spring and winter can't let go.
  I can't let go, through dread, of silver maybes:
  of black that glows, as a cowbird's sheen
  of gray dawns when, mud-colored slow,
  
  the river to the west gurgles hosannas..." (p. 55)
  
  
  ***
  
  "Near the shore, this white oak split in two
  struggles to endure sea winds and grow,
  twin columned chapped and branches stripped of leaves." (p. 79)
  
  ***
  
  No, I don't like these poems. Trees don't get "chapped," rivers don't gurgle hosannas and yet Schulman's lukewarm keyboard "through dread, of silver maybes" still clickity-clacks. But for that shrinking, establishment well-educated, well-heeled Baby Boomer (the previous, Schulman's, Silent) Generation, this is verse - a hundred-odd years ago these are the kind of poems you read if you found Emily Dickinson too jagged, too disturbing. And when Garrison Keillor reads them in that sonorous if not stupefying baritone on NPR "Writer's Notebook," they sounds sublime. But trust me, they're not.
• 
  Barbara

  Grace Schulman continues to amaze and inspire
• 
  Erika Dreifus

  Gorgeous book. I treasure my autographed copy. "Kol Nidrei, September 2001," is, for me, perhaps the most stunning poem in the book.
• 
  DilanAc

  Some of these poems like the title poem are very accessible; some are more cryptic. Music, visual arts, history, nature, politics are all important sources of material for her. Query at the beginning of the book was a poem that completely resonated with me. It expressed something that I wanted to say to someone beautifully.