Free The Devil Never Sleeps by Andrei Codrescu Page A

force.” The meek, for whom Christ apparently died, are all but forgotten. For Charles Bukowski, it’s not worth living in a future where “hospitals are so expensive it’s cheaper to die.”
    Bukowski is one of the few poets—Tom Dent was another—to speak on behalf of the downtrodden in a manner not checked by self-consciousness. From the 1930s to midcentury, such paucity of proletarian sympathy would have been shocking. Even more shocking to those distant ages of humanism would have been the radical doubts some poets have about the nature of humanity itself. Bruce Andrews produced an alphabetical list of words defined randomly by vaguely familiar found phrases. Rae Armantrout’s faith is retained only by a question mark: “No one home / in the ‘Virtual Village’? / Between the quote marks / nothing but disparagement.”

    Jack Marshall noted, with remarkable understatement: “Earth’s not cherry anymore.” A shattering malaise has entered the world and left its signature in fractured language, a medium no longer transparent, and badly suited for carrying understanding. All that remains are the shards of what we thought or had been made to think, shards that are vastly outnumbered by the things we make and buy. What did we think? What were we made to think? Whatever it was, it is late. “Ditto the caveat, ibid the scam,” writes Bill Berkson. Some epitaph!
    The elegiac calibrates even the densest texts, the most telegraphic notations. For some, here Charles Bernstein, the multiplication of products induces regret at having done anything at all: “The goats pass / from view, the boys / skip stones from / melancholy hydroplanes. / I should have wasted my life.”
    Without irony such sentiments would be tragic. But not necessarily. The world of bright, shiny, American-made objects has its fans. For David Trinidad, an Angeleno, the American century is the movies. He loves them, they are as complete a language as personal psychology.
    Joe Cardarelli in “Against 21st Century,” disdains the coming age of antiseptic living. He has loved his time and the abusive pleasures of his world. There are also ways of relishing the mess, as Pat Nolan suggests: “acquire a taste for the bitterseweet / it soothes that sinking feeling.”
    Jim Gustafson celebrates the joys of “not getting caught.”
    Still, an American De Natura Rerum is missing from this book, which is a mystery. In saying goodbye to their century, our poets were careful to note as Janine Pommy Vega does, “Noise, blood, suffering” but kept their distance from even those objects that DO appear occasionally in their poems.
    Are there any hopeful goodbyes? Well, some of the women think so. They are able to see the future as something they will give birth to, something to nurture.
    Janine Canan says: “Oh Century, my laborious Century! / Drop by Drop the blood-streaked columns thicken / and our ancient fire glows still.” Bernadette Mayer prays for better men and women to inhabit the planet: “so therefore war father, mother, let me be & leave me / I know how to propagate the race for slightly peace that is / to only give birth to women: or to sweet loving boys who have in their builds / no desire to make us war or crazier.”
    Sex receives its homage but not as lyrically as was once the norm. Summer
Brenner reports some “naked doric gals on Emerald Hill” who have no regret for having whooped it up.
    Make no mistake: the sacred that enters the world of these poems has gotten here the hard way. It has made its way through beliefs and discarded beliefs. It has survived loves and Love. It has stared Death in the face. It has burrowed through the postmodern fragments of poetry and through the shopping malls. It has outlived the death of the twentieth century, a harsh father. It has asked, who will pay the century’s “karmic debt”?
    Alice