Leave the Room To Itself

by Graham Foust

Poetry. Winner of the 2003 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, judged by Joe Wenderoth, who comments, in his "There are many ways to hear 'it takes off the top of my head.' For me, the most important way to hear it it makes me suddenly and oddly aware that I am alive--aware that I am simultaneously at the end and the beginning of my power, which is simply to be there and to say so. Foust's poems do this for me; I feel akin to the mute struggler that lurks all around these poems that eludes so many attempts at saying that and where and how he is. The struggle is, in my view, dignified -- never self-congratulatory, never self-pitying -- and it has produced sounds for us to come back to--sounds for us to set out from"--Joe Wenderoth, from the introduction.

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Joe Sacksteder · Rating 4 out of 5]

Got really strong in the middle, especially The National, Fashion, and Politics. At the end it seemed to get a bit too sparse - as if it was trying to perform the poetry version of a fade out, and it didn't seem nearly as strong. "Leave the room / to itself. Compare it / to a sleeping, / living creature." I think I'll use this concept when teaching Perec's "Species of Spaces." Favorite line: "untangling / toward an umpteenth comfort."

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two Poems from Leave the Room to Itself by Graham Foust:

Stadium


In a house
beyond mansion,

our forgetting isn't always
a forgetting.

Some of this amnesia's
an appreciable rage

into which a kind of grave
is carved.


* * * * *

Skull


Such a white planet.

And what scars
the eyes are,

what page the lack of face.

Compare this
to flowers

in a house.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Click here to read my review of Leave the Room to Itself in Jacket #25

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great short lyrics.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, I shouldn't have read it all in one sitting. The second half is either not as good as the first half, or I started getting used to it. That first half, though. Whew.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

My 3-star rating should be understood as a rating of me as a poetry reader -- do I know how to approach a book of poetry? Can I assess a single poem in any useful way, much less a collection of them?

Foust's poems are strange and familiar to me.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Litotes is the rhetorical term for the self-effacing double negative, and Graham Foust closes "As of Late," his debut-closing poem, firmly on it: "to have been |come after: || that meat of the fruit | of the powers that will, || the powers that will not | not be". Foust tropes metonymically on "fruit," as "a knowledge," which, in turn, tropes Henry James' definition of the real in the preface to The Americans: "The real represents to my perception the things we cannot possibly not know, sooner or later, in one way or another; it being but one of the accidents of our hampered state, and one of the incidents of their quantity and number, that particular instances have not yet come our way." Foust's project is to turn thought into James' "particular instances." The erotic charge in the speaker's having "been come after" plays around in James' litotes, -- a come-hither, comely allure. Who is Graham Foust? He begins the volume in a fit against "The Country Between Us," the Forche title, asserting: "today studies us | and such." Who is the poet? "What is the poem," Foust concludes. Forche stands for Foust for all that is malleable in a poetry of experience, to which he forensically rebuts (in a poem with a title that cops from Walter Benjamin) with quickened thought: "Once is struck | with unimaginable sameness. || Twice is all there is | is never here." Foust uses Benjamin in very traditional terms, here, against Forche, to say, in essence, poetry (her poetry) is not possible after Auchwitz. The poems can carry a literary sleight of hand, as when, in a rage against the emptiness of poetic conventions of self-reflection, Foust hits upon the right figure for that emptiness, for instance, a "Stadium": "In a house | beyond mansion, || our forgetting isn't always | a forgetting. || Some of this amnesia's | an appreciable rage || into which a kind of grave | is carved." That's a very nice little allegory (in Williams' modality) for the rage in these poems, which keep insisting the political isn't possible except in the covert ways they want to court it. It's also Milton's moving grave ("my self, my sepulcher, a moving grave") and Foust would like his "rage" to be precisely "appreciable," though sometimes the words' bother seems all too much groused over and adequated in words: "Bits of light survive themselves," for example, is not an auspicious way to begin a poem. This feels like a young poet's book -- if bound to appeal to grousers in the young and old alike.

[Derek H · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just can't get behind this one, and I appear to be in lonely company when it comes to this assertion. There's a Creeley-esque craft here--the attention to the word and the line on which word rests is exquisite--the balance is delicate and insistent, without listing to either side. But the sensibility is troubling to me; cynical, even. It's not simply a disillusionment that I'm discerning in these poems, but an anger at the conditions for disillusionment. The anger feels displaced, and the disillusionment is, in general, in the service of a quiet rage that never feels fully embodied. That disembodied rage worries me, and makes me wonder at the truly human conditions that instill it, that make it worthy of mention and attention. The lines, at last, seem to me a disservice to the poems' subjects and originary impulses.

Plus! While Califone get a shout out in the notes section, Laughing Hyenas don't--and the quote is a (cynical) rephrasing of their beautiful, anguished insistence that "you can't pray a lie". Call me a bull-headed Michigander, but I'm still unmoved by any assertion otherwise.

[Bernadette · Rating 4 out of 5]

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