The Ruined Millionaire: New Selected Poems 2002-2022 by Ben Mazer. Mad Hat Press, 2023. 122 pp. $21.95 (paper)

In a literary culture saturated with poets, where success so often has as much or more to do with MFA programs, conferences, social media and social justice (one often being confused with the other), and flagrant self-promotion as it does with the quality of one’s writing, the major poet is an anachronistic and inconvenient figure. Even the major poem (or, God forbid, the anthology piece) seems an endangered species, as our poets gravitate toward sprawling book-length “projects” that champion disjointed narrative at the expense of the self-contained lyric.

How refreshing, then, to encounter a poet who insists on being major, both in the force of his art and in the company he keeps. Ben Mazer’s The Ruined Millionaire: New Selected Poems 2002-2022 announces its allegiance in its title, an allusion T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, in which the eponymous millionaire is God Himself. Glyn Maxwell’s glowing preface locates Mazer “in the ruins of English verse,” and the poems abound with nods to Eliot, as well as W. B. Yeats, Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, and Robert Lowell. Mazer, a Jew by birth and an Episcopalian by faith, who writes candidly about his own struggles with mental illness, isn’t much interested in these writers’ prejudice and privilege either. Rather, he sees himself as contemporaneous with the titans of the past, and with the death of Geoffrey Hill, he may be the last poet alive worthy of being called a High Modernist—a decidedly unmodern title to hold in 2023. As he writes in “Death and Minstrelsy”:

Poems are but evidence of poetry.
Mysterious kitchens you shall search them all—
and choose your death at sea by thirty-three.
And once in winter heard the Archduke Trio
performed by friends in the conservatory.

The poet follows an almost exact quotation from Crane’s “The Tunnel” with a reference to his suicide and a sentence fragment that sounds like something Ezra Pound excised from The Waste Land. Later, Mazer evokes the ocean—that great source of creation and destruction in so much of Eliot’s and Crane’s work—in a terrifying line as good as the best of either writer: “The sea’s maw beckons to the life it spawned.” These connections are never lost on the poet himself; the first line of the passage above, gnomic yet direct, is one instance of his self-reflexiveness. As the poet and novelist Ben Lerner has observed of John Ashbery, whose poem “Avenue Mozart” supplies the epigraph to “Death and Minstrelsy,” Mazer uncannily writes the experience of reading his own work into the poems themselves. Take these lines from the first poem in the book, “The Double”:

I know it is good when the good of it is not noticed.
It is something you try to tell someone privately in a room
where the light is broken in October.

To call Mazer the best guide to his own work would be an accurate appraisal, were it not for his elliptical logic (or illogic) of association, his misdirection and prestidigitation. Suffice it to say that many of these poems resist this reader’s intelligence almost successfully, and there’s one, “The March Wind,” that I can’t make head or tail of, even after multiple readings. But poetry need not be understood to be good, and the very best poems hold on to their deepest mysteries long after they have wormed their way into their readers’ consciousness. Mazer’s poems contain a peculiarity of imagination and expression that sets the work of the most original poets apart from the rest, and that strangeness persists even in the most demotic poems in this volume:

One night we boiled all the chemicals in the kitchen
and poured them steaming from a pot on the hoods of cars.
                          “Cambridge in the Seventies”

The child was feeding an enormous dog
she held upon her lap, just like a baby.
Bottle of milk in hand, she opened its mouth.
There I saw an entire electronic switchboard
of knobs and dials and indicating screens.
The young thing was a vegetable, they explained.
                              “Deep Sleep Without Reservations”

Another factor that keeps Mazer’s work consistently compelling, even at its most obscure, is its prosody. The Ruined Millionaire displays a remarkable technical dexterity; Mazer is equally at home writing heroic couplets, blank verse, long Whitmanesque lines of free verse (as in “The Double,” where Walt gets a shoutout), and song-like lyrics like “Gethsemane,” whose first stanza’s insistent rhyme cheekily encourages us to mispronounce the poem’s title:

You were insane, and I was sane,
now you are sane, and I’m insane.
I met you first in Gethsemane
when you are gone, and I remain.

Mazer is also a prolific sonneteer, and his sonnets honor and partake of the form’s rich tradition without sacrificing innovations in verse since its Elizabethan heyday. I wish the poet had included more of them in this volume, but the two that do appear are gorgeous. “In the garden the night is directionless,” excerpted from the sequence “The King,” exemplifies Mazer’s peculiar ability to move and mystify at once:

The wide walkways of the stars divide
chapters of our lives like music in reverse.

“The sun burns beauty, spins the world away,” from the lovelorn February Poems (Ilora Press, 2017), proceeds with an urgency and concision of metaphor worthy of Shakespeare:

Do not consume, like the flowers, time and air
or worm-soil, plantings buried in the spring,
presume over morning coffee I don’t care,
neglect the ethereal life to life you bring.

There are many contemporary formalist poets who protest the label, some of them justifiably. “The problem for New Formalism,” Maxwell declares in the preface, “is there’s no such thing as new formalism”; that rhyme and meter are “gifts and givens” for Mazer distinguishes his work from that of so many so-called formalists and places him much closer to figures like Lowell, Bishop, Roethke, and Plath—poets who moved between received forms and free verse (and inhabited the rich space between them) with little hullabaloo from the reading public, poets who were concerned above all else with making great poems and used whatever techniques they required to accomplish the feat. And while Mazer is often guilty of what the formalists’ detractors hold to be their worst sins—archaisms, inversions, vertiginous syntax—he is too much at ease in seemingly disparate poetic modes (the confessional, the avant-garde, and the mock-heroic, to name a few) to easily classify. What is apparent is the breadth and depth of his reading; regardless of his mode, he writes in a poetic idiom shaped by meticulous scholarly work on Eliot, Crane, John Crowe Ransom, Delmore Schwartz, and the nearly forgotten 19th-century master Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, whose wildly original rhyme schemes and command of pentameter set a high standard. Indeed, Mazer’s work often recalls William Logan’s description of Robert Lowell as “a poet for whom writing pentameter was like breathing.” Mazer brings to the page the same mastery—and the same spontaneity. “At the Altar,” a deliberate pastiche of Lowell’s early poem of faith and adultery, “Between the Porch and the Altar,” vacillates between an almost devotional lyric beauty:

                         …I take the Eucharist,
scared by the watching nun, the smiling priest,
and see Christ’s holy robes of purple blood
rippling and rising past my widowhood…

and surreal body horror:

My mirror looks like just another dyke
for him to plug; each Satan is a thug….
He smiles and pisses coffee on the rug
for me to clean, while he goes out to fuck….
O Mary, Mary, help me, I am stuck;
O Mary, Mary, I am out of luck….
Will Mary marry Jesus, and then suck
my brain out of his ass, and kiss his muck?

Situated at the intersection of religious experience, sadomasochistic fantasy, and nightmare, Mazer’s “At the Altar” is a far weirder poem than anything Lowell ever produced. Yet by the time we reach the conclusion, “O Jesus, Mary, how I want to die,” we believe it, and the line is more harrowing for the ecclesiastical melodrama that precedes it.

Mazer’s showmanship, his unabashed embrace of theatricality and even sentimentality in an age of understatement and irony, imparts a largeness and largesse to his best work. His is the latest example of what might be called the poetry of cinematic projection, a strain of modernism that runs from the “magic lantern” of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” through Crane’s ode “To Brooklyn Bridge,” and Delmore Schwartz’s lyrical short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” The aptly titled “A Movie Is Available Knowledge,” for instance, is a small masterpiece of lighting and scene-setting:

                 The North Star
freezes the ship’s light like fire
over the white surf.

“The Double” is in part an attempt to reconcile “Time as a movie,” and in The Ruined Millionaire’s fine title poem, “time’s camera always pans / along the outskirts to the garbage cans.” Mazer’s most extensive exploration of cinematography, moviegoing, and the passage of time, “An After-Dinner Sleep,” is also his longest single poem, and one whose title signals its own ambition (the source is Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, by way of the epigraph to Eliot’s “Gerontion”). “Movies are ghosts that couldn’t get around,” Mazer tells us, “personal fantas[ies]” in the minds of each of their viewers, and yet with an existence of their own. The poem’s twenty-line opening sentence concludes in a memorable description of these “ghosts”:

                         …these conversationalists
who never change, but dissemble unattached
in the cosmos as light and sound, electric charges
of being constituting their own drama,
vanishing in space but not in mind,
reminding us of the nature of our being.

Mazer’s poems, too, remind us of the nature of our being: knotty, puckish, recalcitrant, easily hurt, and ever susceptible to the beauty of this world. No poem in this book lacks its own merits, although my list of favorites includes “The Exile,” “Monsieur Barbary Brecht,” “The Rain,” and “The Living Angels.” There are other poems, like “Golden Boy” and “Strawberry Night,” that begin in obscurity but culminate in passages of extraordinary beauty. Here is the final stanza of the latter:

Was he never happier? Then tell
the story of how after she had left
he had stood in the rain outside the tent
watching them through the lit-up transparency
and placed his drink directly on the line
between the lit-up and the unlit grass
of the wide lawn, under the far lights.

The poet never fully articulates the relationship between the “he” and his presumable love interest, but that radiant final image trembles with all the longing, alienation, and severance that go unstated in the poem. “The lit-up transparency” dividing the protagonist and the partygoers could be a metaphor for poetry itself, a screen that obscures the figures behind it even as it lends them a celestial refulgence.

My chief complaint about this volume is that it doesn’t include more of Mazer’s verse, or at least a greater chronological variety of it—19 of the 34 poems included here are reprinted from two collections, Poems (Pen and Anvil Press, 2010) and New Poems (Pen and Anvil Press, 2013), and 26 of them appeared in his first Selected Poems (2017), also published by MadHat Press, so The Ruined Millionaire represents, in large part, a sometimes overly judicious distillation of the earlier volume. Impressive as the handful of new poems are, the seasoned reader of Mazer longs for selections from books under- or unrepresented here, such as his all but unobtainable debut, White Cities (Barbara Matteau Editions, 1995) and the absurd and elegiac January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010). Readers searching for a more comprehensive and conventionally structured overview of this poet’s oeuvre should look to the earlier selected, and, of course, the individual collections. Nevertheless, The Ruined Millionaire serves as a marvelous introduction to Mazer’s work and will hopefully spur new readers to seek out more of his poetry. To quote “The Double,” again, “Often it is much better than I am describing.”