Selfwolf

by Mark Halliday

In his third book of poems, Mark Halliday grapples with the endless struggle between self-concern and awareness of the rights of others. Through humor, ironic twists, and refreshing candor, these poems confront a variety of situations—death, divorce, artistic egotism and envy, personal relationships—where the very idea of self is under siege.

"If Selfwolf were a pop music CD, it would be hailed as Mark Halliday's breakthrough album. . . . This third collection of poems teems with unsparing confessions of misdirected lust, lost faith, regret and a winningly goofy cheerfulness in the face of all that bad stuff. . . . The informal, conversational quality of Halliday's work almost hides its artfulness, which seems to be precisely his intention."—Ken Tucker, New York Times Book Review

"With unflinching, often comic honesty about how 'ego-fetid, hostile, grasping' we are, Halliday exposes the self's wolfish hungers and weaknesses."—Andrew Epstein, Boston Review

"Mark Halliday's new book offers more of his trademark riffs on self-consciousness. His subversive, surprising, hugely enjoyable poems will make you laugh out loud, squirm in uncomfortable recognition, and appreciate anew the comedy of our daily battles for self-preservation. . . reading Halliday is pure delight. . . . I love the daring and intelligence with which Halliday skates along the shifting boundary between self within and world outside. Selfwolf slows down our habitual negotiations between 'in here' and 'out there,' exposing the edgy comedy of how we survive."—Damaris Moore, Express Books

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

About the author

Mark Halliday (born 1949 in Ann Arbor, Michigan) is a noted American poet, professor and critic. He is author of six collections of poetry, most recently "Thresherphobe" (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008). His honors include serving as the 1994 poet in residence at The Frost Place, inclusion in several annual editions of The Best American Poetry series and of the Pushcart Prize anthology, receiving a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, and winning the 2001 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Halliday earned his B.A. (1971) and M.A. (1976) from Brown University, and his Ph.D. in English literature from Brandeis University in 1983, where he studied with poets Allen Grossman and Frank Bidart. He has taught English literature and writing at Wellesley College, the University of Pennsylvania, Western Michigan University, Indiana University. Since 1996, he has taught at Ohio University, where, in 2012, he was awarded the rank of distinguished professor.[5] He is married to J. Allyn Rosser.

Reviews

[Jim McGarrah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Halliday’s poetry is often self-deprecating, reflective, and bitter sweet. Maybe that’s why I like him, but maybe not. Maybe I like him because he’s pretty damn funny and not afraid to puncture egos, including his own. In his collection, Selfwolf, four poems come to mind right away that tear apart any illusions we might have as poets about our superior and elevated way of writing. These poems also shatter the pretensions that often accompany exalted reputations. Of the four poems (i.e. Poetry on Friendship, Loaded Inflections, Non-tenured, and Self-Importance) Self Importance was the one that seemed to contain the most insight into the danger or thinking too much of ourselves. It was humorous, but the humor contained dark passages of warning.

When Halliday says, speaking of other passengers on an airplane:

…they look
important to someone in some sphere of activity.
That’s nice; but it is small potatoes. Whereas
I am in this largeness located right here above my neck.
There are ten or even twenty people who would care a lot
If I crashed to the bottom of the sea but besides that
There is this more palpable kind of importance:
It bubbles in me.

the sarcasm drips from these words, not like water, but more like hot candle wax. There is even satire in the way he uses punctuation. Semi-colons and colons enhance the business like, matter of fact, objective tone of the words, as if some executive was issuing a memo to his readers that contained incontrovertible truth about the status of a major corporation. It is a very effective technique.

On the other hand, Non-Tenured has the same biting Halliday wit, but also appears to be a genuine internal debate regarding a poet’s priorities. It’s the constant struggle between security and taking risks in writing that seems to interest Halliday. He’s painfully aware of the impossibility of earning a living as a writer and yet, through a narrative that uses the doppelganger as a vehicle, he examines the other side of the coin and finds it more frustrating and mind-numbing.

The day is hot. I can feel myself not
getting tenure. To write a book on Frost
or whoever is as far from me as Alaska and I see
me in ten years – not a professor,
and not a lawyer and not an editor making firm decisions
on the twentieth floor in Manhattan. No,

one of those faintly smelly people you meet
occasionally at a party or more oddly
in a restaurant or theater – they recognize you…

And on the poem goes describing the interaction between the poet and his smelly admirer, until mid-way. Here it turns on a single sentence, “And now somehow you are really visiting this person.” From this point forward you get the impression that what Halliday might really be visiting are the alternatives existing inside him. For me, this was where the poem took off and the writing became very interesting.

Loaded Inflections is one of those self-deprecating poems I spoke of earlier. It is a poem that recognizes limitation and how the ego will certainly limit the ability to see the “big picture” in poetry and by extension, in life. I think Halliday also takes a swipe at the limitation in critical analysis as well. When we judge other people for what they write, then we do it incompletely because we can’t hear the inflections in their words. We assume without true knowledge. We can only guess. “…but only God, or the genius critic of the next century/ truly hears all of both conversations.”

This seemed to be a solid collection and the self-written blurb on the back added greatly to the theme of the book. It was also very funny. One slight issue,some of the poems seem over-conversational, almost like personal essays. I understand why Halliday would want to deal with this satirical subject matter with a conversational tone. On the other hand, by writing poetry in this manner with less language compression and more casual speech patterns, some individual poems seemed dulled down with passive verbs and sing-song syntax.

[amelia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too cute by half and often cloyingly didactic – every poem has a wind-up and a ‘punchline’, a rhythm which by the third poem feels more like a rhythm of assembly-line work than a rhythm of thought. Read this because I read a snippet of his book Stevens and the Interpersonal, a hatchet-job on Ashbery’s solipsism and lack of political imagination (likely a fair criticism, all things considered), and wanted to see what Halliday’s idea of an Other-respecting poetry would be. He aims at something like the suppleness of O'Hara's human-scale poems and for the most part lands instead in the gauzy realm of touchy-feely Hallmark Human Interest, unhappily tinged with Horny Divorcee. This is a meaner review than is entirely necessary, but I felt battered by the end of this thing, and it’s only seventy-seven pages.

The best poems here are “Timberwolf”, “Ballad of Little Millard”, “Non-Tenured”, “Divorce Dream”, “Taipei Tangle”, and “Pages”.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first volume of Mark Halliday: the tension between self-concern and regard for others here alternates between wry and self-deprecating to almost mean-spirited. His verse is humorous while being light, but the lines can be slightly prosaic and some lines seem almost more at home in a personal essay. It's highly enjoyable.

[YL · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed Selfwolf, but there were moments when it made me uncomfortable, when the humor and sharp observation bordered on meanness. (or at least, in my, possibly oversensitive, ear)

It's fascinating though, to read Halliday in sequence -- I've gone through Selfwolf, Jab, and Thresherphobe, so far -- and observe the evolution of some sort of poetic self. Halliday has the same cool-jazz-new-yorker voice throughout his books, but his concerns shift in a discernable pattern. Selfwolf is a younger man's book and has a bit of a younger man's aggression, and a younger man's solipsism.

But, so, if anything, I am sort of comforted by the 'problems' in this book, wisdom might come for me yet!

[Jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Halliday often sounds like a poet who really wanted to be a fiction writer. Many of these poems are scenarios he's playing out in his head that are a cross between Frank O'Hara and Russell Edson, proportionally about 1/4 O'Hara and 1/4 Edson and the rest Halliday's own sense of humor and irony--maybe a dash of E.A. Robinson's love of creating a character study with teeth.

In this particular volume he's casting a baleful eye upon himself as a poet and academic. Think of the title "Selfwolf" as a play on the phrase "self worth." Instead of fostering worth, you're devouring your self with doubts and self-criticism all while in the stew of others' doubts and criticisms of others and self.

Just as Halliday's mind roves, he writes in free verse. He does not believe that lines need to be regulated, so within any given poem, there will be longer lines and shorter ones. Every now and then he breaks into alliteration or rhyme and it comes across as humorous.

Is this Halliday's best work? No. But after reading some very disappointing books from the prize long-lists, it's just what I needed to enjoy poetry again. Because many of his poems play with stories, Halliday's work could be a good cross-over for people who normally read fiction. However, the extent to which this book focuses on his profession may not make it the best one to recommend. If you're a writer or academic, however, you may find some of his takes on that lifestyle painfully accurate.

Here are a couple of his poems, the first from this book, the second from 1989.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is sophisticated, surprising, male-gazy, approachable, unpredictable, self-involved, & huggable.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first book of Halliday's I've read, and while I really like the informality of his language, some of the poems were too prosaic and clunky, even for me, a fan of such things. I'd still recommend this poet, but I bet he has better collections.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good rebounder but an even better poet.