irØnclad
poetry
Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2025
$40.00, 278 pages ISBN: 978-1-963908-88-6
A poem teaches its reader to read it. A truism, plenty truthy. I, too, like it. It fits in any conversation about poetry, and it always sounds good. All present will nod knowingly and murmur mmm-hmm into their plastic cup of box wine.
Plenty truthy, but not always true. It is formulated as a fact, that every poem does teach its reader to read it, but it formulates an ideal, that any poem should. The purported fact is false because the ideal is seldom fulfilled. Most poems do not teach the reader to read them, because they don’t have to. What they fulfill is not an ideal but a norm. They meet expectations.
It was ever so. In her introduction to the 1996 Best American Poetry, Adrienne Rich noted how many of the poems she read “rang hollow and monotonous to me; at best they seemed ingenious literary devices, at worst ‘publish or perish’ items for a vita or an M.F.A. dissertation — academic commodities.” She was, she said, “constantly struck by how many poems published in magazines today are personal to the point of suffocation. The columnar, anecdotal, domestic poem, often with a three-stress line, can be narrow in more than a formal sense.” She was identifying the mode of the day, the conditions to be met for a poem not to have to teach its reader to read it.
Thirty years on, the mode of our day is no less narrow. It could not be characterized more vividly than in these words from an anonymous reader’s report on a poetry manuscript sent to a university press poetry series: “These poems always have an eerieness to them. I appreciate their mystery, but sometimes I feel like I don’t have a clear enough grasp on the subject, or I can’t put together the pieces of the story well enough, to fully enjoy the poem. I don’t know that I want to work as hard to extract meaning as the poems seem to require.” The reviewer concluded by complaining that “In the end, these poems leave me with a bunch of questions.” If in 1996 poetic expectations called for a “columnar, anecdotal, domestic poem, often with a three-stress line,” in 2025 poetic expectations call for the poem to be clear, tell a story, demand no work from its reader, and pose no questions. The poem of our day does not elicit effort or reflection, it wins a like. The appropriate response is “thanks for sharing.” Ours is the poetry of confirmation bias.
This is not surprising, since it is consistent with the larger direction of human society, in which most reading, not only most reading of poetry, takes place not on pages but on the screens of devices that operate in fulfillment of confirmation bias. But the hegemony of confirmation bias in the larger world of human communication does not entail that we should acquiesce to it in poetry. It remains possible to put up resistance to one’s own confirmation bias, and it remains possible to seek to continue learning from what one reads how one might read.
Marc Vincenz’s irØnclad does not adopt the mode of the day. It does not merely meet expectations, so it has to teach its reader to read it. Of the ways in which it does so, one is the creation of moments that are not identified as, but can be read as, ars poetica statements, moments such as these lines that end a poem explicitly about religion, not about poetry:
Make it mysterious, was said.
Make it archaic, was said.
Make it infinite, was said.
(In the book, the imperatives are boldface and red, in contrast to the iterations of “was said,” each of which is plain text and black.) Grammatically, the “it” refers either to religion or to a unifying theory, but when the lines are read in isolation (they are given their own page) the echo of Pound’s “make it new” suggests also reading the “it” as poetry. The imperatives occur in a particular context, at the end of a poem the title of which is a question: “Religion?” They follow a colon, and are given not as points that the poem’s speaker asserts and avers, but as points the speaker reports second-hand:
Eventually, at a legendary confluence of philosophers,
polemicists & part-time politicians, it was decided
that there needed to be a unifying theory
that would satisfy all the practical citizenry:
Make it mysterious, was said.
Make it archaic, was said.
Make it infinite, was said.
Plato embeds ideas in the same way. Nothing in the Symposium or the Republic is given as Plato’s own idea: everything is reported. Apollodorus wasn’t present at the symposium; he is passing along what barefoot Aristodemus told him about it. The effect in Plato is to free ideas for scrutiny apart from their advocates (“I don’t care who said it; I care if it’s true”). The effect in Vincenz is to free the ideas to apply in and beyond their immediate context. In context, the threefold imperative can be something that — passive voice — was said in legend by fictional figures about a hypothetical theory of religion, but beyond its context it would offer a compelling trio of ideals for a work of poetry, and thus a compelling set of imperatives for a poet to embrace. As, in irØnclad, Vincenz does: he has made the book mysterious, archaic, and infinite.
Mysterious as for example in its affinity with fantasy/sci fi, an affinity signaled by such cues as epigraphs from Stanislaw Lem, and realized as irØnclad‘s occupation of an alternate world adjacent to our own. Archaic in its documenting an alternate history, and concomitantly defamiliarizing the present. Infinite in its defiance of spatial and temporal constraints, of confinement to sequence and contiguity, as signaled by the book’s subtitle, the future present.
To illustrate with only one example from the many in this thickish book, “Mechanical Rats Crystallizing,” more or less midway through the book, drops the reader into a place and time in which, and among a people for whom,
When it all ran dry, we realized
water had to be reassigned by the Will of the One.
As such, we finally came to the conclusion
the only solution was to insert the mechanical rats.
There is some context, since the poem is part of a section of the book called “The Mayfly Codex,” so one assumes that the “we” is continuous across the poems in that section, but that context only confirms the poem as mysterious, archaic, and infinite. It only creates occasion for more instances of “was said”: “Technology is a glass marvel, after all, it was said. / The man with the glass eye unsees you from here too, was said.” Far from giving enough pieces of the story to relieve the reader of effort and questions, it withholds enough pieces to raise for the reader, rather than answering for the reader, questions such as why
the rats became our new Custodians.
They cleaned every surface until it shone like silver, &
with surgical precision, gleefully ate everything above the dirt.
A poem’s teaching one to read it matters if how one reads influences what one understands, and if poetry does not isolate what one knows from, but integrates it with, how one experiences. A poem’s teaching one to read it matters if it aspires, not to relieve the reader of effort and questions, not to satisfy the reader’s confirmation bias, but (as irØnclad aspires) to offer, in Lyn Hejinian’s words, “a medium for experiencing experience.”