Public Stakeholders and the 21st Century Ode
Denise Low
What Monsters You Make of Them, by Christian Teresi Red Hen Press, 2024.
Odes are long, formal poems derived from the classical Greek literary tradition of public commemoration. For the original audience, they celebrated victorious athletes, political figures, and public events in the city-state’s theater. Pindar (522–433 BCE) is credited with first inventing the ode form for dramatic performance. Today, an ode’s topic might still be about a public occasion more than an individual’s life, but it is personally felt. Christian Teresi complicates the definition of the American-English ode as it navigates colossal public issues of the 21st century in a very lyrical way. He selects idiosyncratic favorites as his subjects as a first step in customizing his collection What Monsters You Make of Them. He tours his own short list of United States national parks, and other iconic spaces as settings. He curates celebrities like Goya, Mike Tyson, and jazz great Sonny Rollins. The electronic media have expanded human-scale localities into a patchwork of global culture, so a search engine is needed to stay abreast. Teresi confronts this giant dragon in his brave, thoughtful verse.
Teresi is not a dramatist. Rather he works with the odic tradition of the Roman poet Horace (b. 65 BCE), which is less formal and suggests reflection more than public proclamation. Teresi grounds each poem with his narrator’s participation. That
lens along with long-muscled lines unify the collection. The poet humbly, persistently, and effectively mainstreams etymologies of words into his verse, from Ojibwemowin (Ojibwa language) to Russian to Latin—paying homage to all the ancestors.
An epigraph about climate change before the poem “Reading Carlos Drummond de Andrade in Everglades National Park” is detailed and effective. It informs readers: “Up to 87% of the global wetland resource has been lost since 1700. We lose wetlands three times faster than natural forests” (The Ramsar Convention). This focuses the poem on climate change before an extensive tour of the deteriorating Everglades National Park in poetic form, with alligators and humans as representative images of the wetlands. The unpredictable monster, paradoxically, is the human who destroys land for mango orchards. The poem begins with this section:
On the edge of the park tourists pay to hold the hatchlings
Of the caged ten-foot attraction whose half-burrow leaves little
Room to turn around in the mudpack the way she did waiting
For workers on break to amuse themselves with a bit of peril
Tossing scraps into the canal to gawk at her ravenous contortions
Alligators do not know the difference between food they catch
In the wild where they may wait submerged for forty-five minutes
And food fed to them by workers behind a meat packing plant
The first two sections of the poem, ten couplets, detail the interplay between commerce-oriented humans and the persistently wild alligators. These are the strophe and antistrophe phases of the poem, setting up the oppositions between tourists who “pay to hold the hatchings” and the uncomplicated, hungry animal: “alligators must be alligators.” The epode, third section and middle ground, shifts to the root of this evil:
Money from the Roman title of the Goddess Juno the Protector Of the State and a word that has the same ancestor as monitor
Which is meant to caution you into remembering the expense
To lawfully permit parcels of eternity and forever and everglade.
This moralizing against the monetizing of natural resources is a major theme of the book.
The epigram for the entire book is a quotation from Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “A Flor e a Náusea” (translated by Richard Zenith):
How can I forgive the world’s crimes? I took part in many. Others I concealed.
Some I found beautiful, and they were published. Soothing crimes, which make life more bearable. A daily ration of error, delivered at our door.
By ruthless milkmen of evil.
By ruthless bread boys of evil.
Here the issue of human cruelty is declared. Indeed the book uncovers injustices alongside joys—even as the speaker is complicit in the paradoxes and crimes: “I took part in many.” This positioning of the book’s narrative persona, immersed in and not apart from, is important to the book’s integrity.
Teresi’s accusations are not objectified separations of Other. His use of pronouns is significant, as in “An Alternate Version of Goya’s The Dog,” which begins: “We look at what could be your dog drowning.” He brings the reader into the room with him so “we” can view the final insights of the artist in his seventies, when he sets down final, private paintings on his walls. Ironically, these become his most famous and most public paintings, Picturas Negras. The poet explains, “. . . This is the liminal tour of a limited world you choose/ To place your pathos.” Teresi
posted an effective video of this poem on social media (Instagram @ christianteresi_ ). He tellingly uses multiple people to recite the poem in various sites, adding to the poly-vocal nature of his intention as well as expressing his work across multiple platforms. Deft phrasings and a few notes make the book’s factual knowledge accessible, while Teresi amplifies the role of the poet into a larger field than what a citizen might know in classical Greece. The notes trace another cartography of the book, another axis where shared information informs a very personal quest. This is a book that demands attention and then examination of the fate we all share, alligators and artists alike.