Hosts and Guests by Nate Klug. Princeton University Press, 2020. 96 pp. $17.45 (paperback)

Having myself recently persevered through the frustrations, absurdities, and occasional joys of divinity school, which I entered in the first place hoping to discern a call, whatever it might be, to ministry, I can say I’ve learned a great deal over the past three years about patristics, the Q source, the Dura-Europos house church, and—perhaps most importantly—boundaries. Should you travel in ministry circles long enough, the subject of boundaries either implicitly or explicitly will arise, from the clear dividing lines that are unfortunately still transgressed (don’t sleep with your congregants); to murkier but often more benign entanglements (is it professional or even possible to be friends with members of your flock?); to the more invisible but no less vital perimeters (how do I maintain a reasonable sense of privacy for myself and my family in the community I lead?). You impose boundaries around yourself, you quickly come to understand, to protect and perhaps even nourish your professional, emotional, and—not least of all—imaginative survival.

The same could be said for poets. A poet’s style and the process of developing it is in large part a negotiation between what will and won’t be—or can and can’t be—admitted into the poems. If a writer truly does go from good to better by acquiring a grasp over new kinds of material, as Thom Gunn thought, then the progression of a poet requires a constant reorientation of the writing’s boundary lines. And if the poet, that cartographer of the inner life, means to survive, he’d better hope each new book uncovers or clarifies some previously darkened territory on the map.

From his first full collection of poems, Anyone, published in 2015, Nate Klug’s particular gifts were readily apparent—a keen eye, an even keener ear, and a quick mind that sought to compress its acuities into brief, bright sonic glimmerings. The sensibility was not one of some mystic who scissors into the fabric of reality to draw out some essential seam of Truth, but of an attention at once focused and frenetic, enthralled by what it saw and confounded by the fear of what it might have missed. Which is to say: so familiar is this mind to modern consciousness, the speaker could likely be, as the book’s title intimates, anyone at all.

Hosts and Guests, Klug’s new collection of poetry published by Princeton University Press, in similar fashion speaks most comfortably behind a screen of assumed ubiquity. Most of the poems are more interested in their occasions than in the articulation of a specific, individual personality, and operate like tautly wound music boxes—or ticking clocks:

To slow down panic on planes
or just before sleep,
think back, if you can,
to the work of water clocks:
how a toothed wheel, nudged
by falling drops, would rotate,
rectify the dial,
and in that way an hour,
felt or not, was proved…

(“Water Clocks”)

While reading this book, I kept coming back to William Carlos Williams’ idea that a poem is a machine made of words because of its strong impulse toward efficient self-containment. Klug, at his best, can marry image, movement, and melody into precise order, as he does in the lines above through the use of the steady but subtle syncopated trimeter and the careful alliteration that links and moves the ear down the page, sound turning a gear’s teeth. And if the end of a poem should make the same impression on the reader as a box closed shut, with Klug, in moments like the final description of an unusual bloom of jellyfish (“drooping and translucent, / I could skewer my finger through, but never touch”), or in the odd, obscured urgency of traveling by subway (“in the dark the unstill ground / hiding and giving us where we are going”), you can practically hear the prompt, tightly-fitting snap. One often feels, as his poems close, a simultaneous sense of surprise and inevitability.

*

His poetry has been, typically, personal and anecdotal, but the narrator was most comfortable as an almost anonymous observer, least comfortable at the center of the poem, where on occasion the treatment becomes positively rhetorical. The rhetoric amounts to a kind of withholding, but I am not sure of what.

That’s Thom Gunn again, writing about James Merrill—though you very well could say the same of Nate Klug. Despite the fact that Klug possesses little of Merrill’s rhetorical, formal, or even cosmic grandiosity, you can nevertheless discern more than just a hint of his dialect within Hosts and Guests. Like Merrill, Klug’s poems are often focused on their triggering occasion, though the speaker’s presence is often felt only on the edges, and the language eases—or slips—into revealing what’s really at stake. In “The Pokémon Go People,” for instance, much of its oddball charm is derived from the cool irony of its flatly-stated, almost absurdly-premised title. That smirk you’re feeling is your own, not the speaker’s, who’s content to present with equal (though perhaps feigned) seriousness the tourists tracing the alleys and streets of Stonington, Connecticut—“their jean shorts to mid-shin, arms arabesqued” (a modifier that would find itself comfortable in any Merrill poem!)—and the digital sprites they seek “feeling ahead / for which alleyway, or corner of a yard, / might sprout a Snorlax, a purple Aerodactyl” on their phone screens.

Meanwhile, the speaker’s concerns (however unspecified) slowly center themselves in the poem through the telling little flourishes of detail his roving eye can’t help but include. As the speaker surveys the landscape, taking note of the clapboard plaques that “remember Hale, ship captain, and Stewart, joiner, / each calling stenciled right beneath the name,” anxiety suddenly blots the previously sanguine landscape:

In this new life, vocation’s not so certain—

assignments can vibrate at any time, the location
of a needed creature flash, then disappear.
You almost have to be waiting there already,
disconsolate after a day of nothing
as light drains at the former hotspot in Cannon Square.

In those dual, dueling registers between the sacred (discerning a vocation) and the profane (hunting Pokémon), all that’s certain is the divided consciousness. To look upon the statues of the heroes who came before us, who somehow found their callings, lived by them, and settled into the imagination of a culture, all ambiguities clarified by the bronzed writing on a plaque—such is the romance of history. In this new life, as in the old, those moments that in retrospect were charged with meaning—like the blissful singularity of an oncoming, unexpected poem—must seem, as they occur, just as ephemeral or accidental as some unlikely sighting in Pokémon Go. It’s nearly impossible to know what exactly we’re waiting for. As Thomas Traherne writes, in a sentiment aptly chosen as the epigraph to this collection: “We love we know not what, and therefore everything allures us.”

*

Gone now the gaping hours
and the question of what counts for work.

(“Three Months”)

That such a pervasive uneasiness about vocation holds a central place of concern in Hosts and Guests comes as less of a surprise when you consider that Klug, in addition to writing, serves as a UCC minister in California. Klug, though, is no devotional poet, if by “devotional” you mean an art whose aim and audience is, ultimately, God. Even when he evokes the Metaphysical poets through allusion and his own poetic posture, shaped as it is by wit and conceit, and even when his poems do cross into religious subject matter—“The Convert (I & II)”; “First Lent in California”—the poet always seems to stop himself from letting art and faith tangle themselves up too much. The poems, you could say, always read as poems, but would never be confused as prayers.

Elsewhere in an essay titled “Listening Unfolding: Notes on Poetry and Ministry,” Klug has written directly on his need to separate the two:

I entered my late twenties aware of my callings to poetry and ministry, determined to make them both work, and intent on building a sacred boundary between them […] That’s the plan, at least. But on this first morning in the parsonage, I can’t shake the similarities in affect and atmosphere that accompany my two kinds of work. Perhaps experience hammers us over the head with a truth that doctrine is reluctant to admit. Or perhaps we create certain distinctions, certain frictions, to foster creative energy. As I glance out the window, waiting for my ministry in Ramoth to begin, realizing that it has begun, I can’t help but wonder: What does it mean that my pastoral posture looks so suspiciously like my poet’s? What does it mean that poetry and ministry require such uncertainty, an openness that might easily be mistaken for indolence? What does it mean, for both practices, that the waiting feels the same?

All poets eventually come to terms with the constraints of their style, sometimes by imposing their own boundaries—in order to provide privacy, or creative tension, or for any number of reasons that remain unsaid or unacknowledged—or sometimes by redrawing the boundaries imposed upon them. It no doubt says more about our present moment in American poetry than about the poet himself to admit I’ve spent so much of my time preparing for this review wondering why or what, precisely, Klug doesn’t want us to know about him. Confessionalism, in the middle part of the twentieth century, derived its power in large part from what audiences at the time regarded as its reckless candor. It’s now nearly impossible to imagine the surprise or embarrassment or excitement that must’ve comprised a reader’s first encounter with, say, Heart’s Needle or Life Studies, since the content found in those ruthless self-disclosures has become the template for so much of the flaccid, diaristic writing that’s followed. We likely became—and remain—too focused on the content rather than the sensibility of such poems; we followed, in other words, the letter and not the spirit of the style. But the enduring legacy of Confessional poetry is not the permission it granted to generations of younger poets to raid (or curate) their biographies for material. Its legacy persists in its demand for courageous self-examination, even if it meant crossing the limits which to that point had allowed one to survive. Even if it meant making those limits themselves the object of poetic inquiry.

Which is why I find myself, ultimately, so refreshed by the poems of Hosts and Guests. Though he prefers to obscure the personality behind music and wit, though the demarcations between craft and experience sometimes feel a bit too clean and clear, though I couldn’t entirely shake the sense that something was always deliberately hidden, what still unmistakably comes through is the real, visceral sense of risk as Klug redefines what can be included in his poems. In “Face to Face,” “Three Months,” or “The Proof Cloth,” for instance, Klug transgresses his comfortable mode of detached but nevertheless sharp observation for more immediately emotional urgencies: namely, his newborn daughter. And in the six-part “First Lent in California”—the longest poem in the book by far—you can feel the intensity of the poem descend from its usual station in the mind down to the heart:

If, in my family, you were quiet,
it might mean you were happy. It might

mean that you were angry,
and someone had to find out why,

and if you were angry, in my family,
it might mean that you didn’t know yet
(no one knew) you were sad.

Largely stripped of its heady armor, the language in these lines proceeds directly (though not without trepidation) to the multiple meanings that silence often masks. In the deliberate, at times stilted movement of these stanzas—the heavy punctuation, the slightly odd enjambment—we bear witness to his process unfolding, line by line: the style opening, his borders expanding. And in such sheer moments of formal and affective vulnerability, we find the real triumph of the collection: not the dissolution but the re-negotiation of the boundaries separating the sacred and secular, the poet’s public and private lives.

Poetry, like religious belief, after all, is a question of understanding and accepting what limits we live by. Like Klug, I too find myself hesitant about too closely connecting these two impulses, callings, joys, whatever they may be. (Suddenly the ghost of John Milton whispers in my ear, speaking to his own ambivalence about the apparent conflict between poetic ambition and Christian humility: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”) But I am reminded, as I read these poems, that our inner lives, incorrigibly knotted as they tend to be, may not have a choice in the matter. If we’re to provide a full accounting of the truth, our truth at least, perhaps we necessarily end up shifting our old commitments, which is not a betrayal as much as an articulation of the paradox of poetry. In “Lonely Planet,” the final poem of Hosts and Guests, the speaker, so self-consciously aware of inhabiting a quiet moment of happiness, attempts “to fix this happiness in place / by escaping from it.” Fallen as we are, unable to be completely faithful to the moment in the moment, perhaps we can be faithful to the hope that we might fix the moment into place, and all its shifting positions in our minds—which is the hope of the lyric poem.