‘The door through which you were shoved out
into the light
was self-loathing and terror.’

Careening through time and space, having pushed onto the stage of life without any of our own consent, we find ourselves hungering for meaning, hungering for an Absolute. Through the most difficult of times we discover the food for our souls that can best nourish us, yet discover that our bodies, our flesh, is set on an irreversible path towards rot and ruin. Frank Bidart’s confessional collection, ‘Metaphysical Dog’, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, exquisitely explores this hunger for an Absolute, chronicling his life’s pursuit towards understanding while unafraid to document both his failures and fears as he nears his own death. This is a highly psychological collection that—hrough Bidart’s expansively expressive style that is bravely confessional of his own fears of death, the death of his parents, and his own coming out—pushes the reader into the dark recesses of their own mind, towards ‘the eerie acceptance of finitue’, yet always reminding us that despite our destined ruin, we are a creative body ‘through which you seize the world,’ and discover the infinite through the ideas and emotions that pour from the caverns of our heart with a searing light.

As You Crave Soul
but find flesh
till flesh

almost seems sufficient

when the as-yet-unwritten
poem within you

demands existence

all you can offer it are words. Words
are flesh. Words

are flesh

craving to become idea, idea
dreaming it has found, this time, a body

obdurate as stone.

To carve the body of the world
and out of flesh make flesh

obdurate as stone.

Looking down into the casket-crib
of your love, embittered by
soul you crave to become stone.

You mourn not
what is not, but what never could have been.

What could not ever find a body

Because what you wanted, he
wanted but did not want.

Ordinary divided unsimple heart.

What you dream is that, by eating
the flesh of words, what you make

makes mind and body

one. When, after a reading, you are asked
to describe your aesthetics,

you reply, An aesthetics of embodiment

Bidart has a gift for casually caressing the dark fears within our mortal hearts, the fears of dying without ever becoming whole, the fears of a future in which we cannot participate in body, and the horror of watching our flesh wither and die. His style is reflective of life itself, each line spaced out—much like Wittgenstein’s most noted work—spending pages on a poem to allow each moment to be appreciated both in it’s singular beauty, but as a piece of the full evolution of the poem, much like how our individual memories are held dear as singular moments but it is the collective beauty of them all that form a life. Bidart uses full range of italics, all capital letters, bullet points, and other poetic punctuation to adorn his poetry. There is even a section of notes to help elucidate his poetry and give full credit to the many allusions found within. I was initially taken aback by this notes section, but upon further reflection it seems to be a friendly invite into his works and allows for several asides where he can frame the poems in personal or spiritual context that allows for greater enjoyment without feeling like he is holding the readers hand or annoyingly pointing out his own genius.

The true language of ecstasy
Is the forbidden’

‘At seventy-two, the future is what I mourn,’ writes an aging Bidart in ‘The Enterprise is Abandoned’, the title of which being one of the many lines that is repeated like a mantra throughout this collection. Metaphysical Dog is at its best when mulling over our inevitable demise because by reminding us that we must be ground out of existence like the butt of a cigarette, we see how luminescent and glorious our expiring lives truly are and must mourn a future where we cannot exist (at least not in body, but, as Bidart hints, our words and actions remembered in those closest to us are a glimmer of immortality).’Because earth’s inmates travel in flesh,’ Bidart begins his poem ‘Elegy for Earth’, ‘and hide from flesh/and adore flesh/you hunger for flesh that does not die.’ We seek an Absolute, something we can never be, to eternalize our mortal flesh. ‘You’re deathbound,’ he reminds us, we have an expiration date in ‘this journey through flesh/not just in flesh or with flesh/but through it.’ Through flesh, through the mortal and finite and towards a finite. It is such an illustrious and gratifying idea, and it is ideas that travel through space forever, continuing on long after we are dust and memory along with the other decayed flesh that we lusted and loved as we speeded along towards the closed point of our timeline.

’Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
Everybody already knows everything

so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.

But lie to yourself, what you will

lose is yourself. Then you
Turn into them.

Bidart ties together the past and present to illuminate a lifetime spent through flesh, using both his personal history as well as film to exemplify his ideas. It is the confessional poetry that really shines in the collection, which he bravely puts forth in poems such as ‘Queer’ which documents his coming out in a unkind world where even his parents would look down upon him. ‘If I had managed to come out to my/mother, she would have blamed not/me, but herself.’ There are passionate memories of young love:

When I met him, I knew I had

Weaned myself from God, not
hunger for the absolute. O unquenched

mouth, tounging what is and must
remain inapprehensible –

saying You are not finite. You are not finite

This passage really rocks my heart with it’s emotional might; begging and pleading with a god or existence to allow such a moment not be a mere fleeting blip of passing power but an eternal line carving it’s valor as a glowing arc across all of existence and eternity, despite knowing that one may be damned for it. This sort of potency is what words were made for.

Film plays an important role in this collection as well, as Bidart reflects on actors and actresses now gone from both his earlier days and from the modern era. Even Heath Ledger gets a nod, ‘his glee that whatever long ago mutilated his/mouth, he has mastered to mutilate/you’, summing up the poem with a quote from the actor himself (presented here without the poetic spacing and extra line spacing just to keep this review from stretching towards the stratosphere): ‘Once I have the voice/that’s/the line/and at/the end/of the line/is a hook/and attached/to that/ is the soul.’ Bidart uses the Hollywood themes for a duel purpose, exposed in one of the final poems ‘On This Earth Where No Secure Foothold Is’ (another often repeated line. The repetition of lines and words give a powerful, unifying force to this collection that would defy the already butchering effect of a ‘Selected Works’ and amplifies the joy that comes from reading this book in one sitting), where he shows life as having to sell yourself to others, like headshots to Hollywood, and ties the immensity of his work together in one concise poem about identity in a world fueled by consumerism (included at the end of this review).

‘The subject of this poem
is how much the spaces that you now move in
cost….
They cost your life’

In order to grasp beauty, we must live our a mortal life, a life that will be taken away and, as it is ripped from beneath us, shown in all it’s glory. It is poetry that most grasps my heart than any other art form, poetry that moves me more than anything, poetry that reminds me that any sorrow, strife or solitude I suffer is a worthwhile sacrifice for the beauty of words and escaping existence. Frank Bidart has compiled a wonderful collection here, one that didn’t really strike me at first, yet I was unable to put down for days. Each rereading exposed a new perfect sentence, and made me realize his thoughts and musings had been lurking around my brain, making me question my own life and my own mortality even while the book was tightly shut at home. Brave and forthright in his confessional poetry about his life and loves, and cutting as well as wise in his statements of death and our hunger for an Absolute, Bidart delivers an outstanding array of poems that are sure to stick deep in the heart. While they may be bleak at first glace, there is an uplifting power to them that pulls across all the ages of humanity to show us that though we are finite, our ideas can be infinite.
3.75/5

On This Earth Where No Secure Foothold Is
Wanting to be a movie star like Dean Stockwell or Gigi Perreau,
answering an ad at ten or eleven you made your mother drive you
to Hollywood and had expensive Hollywood pictures taken.
          •
Hollywood wasn’t buying.
          •
Everyone is buying but not everyone wants to buy you
          •
You See the kids watching, brooding.
          •
Religion, politics, love, work, sex—each enthrallment, each
enthusiasm presenting itself as pleasure or necessity, is
recruitment.
          •
Each kid is at the edge of a sea.
          •
At each kid’s feet multitudinous voices say I will buy you if you
buy me.
          •
Who do you want to be bought by?
          •
The child learns this is the question almost immediately.
          •
Mother?
          •
Father?
          •
Both mother and father tried to enlist you but soon you learned
That you couldn’t enlist on both at the same time.
          •
They lied that you could but they were at war and soon you
learned you couldn’t.
          •
How glamorous they were!
          •
As they aged they mourned that to buyers they had become
invisible.
          •
Both of them in the end saw beneath then only abyss.
          •
You are at the edge of a sea.
          •
You want to buy buy you know not everyone wants to buy you.
          •
Each enthrallment is recruitment.
          •
Your body will be added to the bodies that piled-up make the
structures of the world.
          •
Your body will be erased, swallowed.
          •
Who do you want to be swallowed by?
          •
It’s almost the same question as To be or not to be.
          •
Figuring out who they want to be bought by is what all the kids
with brooding looks on their face are brooding about.
          •
Your weapon is your mind.