The following critical essay is taken from Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism, published as pamphlet No. 4 in the Culture and History of Literature Series (Pen & Anvil, 2017).

The 32nd section from Ben Mazer's 41-section poem “The King” provides a sudden vista into what the poet in his own mind feels about poetic composition:

Words! How can I deploy at once
on top of each other, the way I might read a page
backwards and forewords, in one photographic instant,
stretching the tongue in all directions at once,
to say the unsayable, cumulative and percussive
explosions signifying an enduring silence,
one fusion of confluence and inclusion,
packed with the weight, the indivisible density,
of all remembered experience and emotion,
and fraught with primordial defiance of the linear,
stabilizing possibility in one vocable,
one sound of thesis and antithesis,
one word for everything, all words in one,
a form large enough into which to put anything!

We see here furious desire torturing itself: words, loud and significant, breeding even as they express the wish that all might end in a divine, peaceful, inclusive, indivisible unity.

Mazer in this poem is the opposite of Buddhist denial, or haiku stillness, Eastern reticence.

Mazer is both austere and fanciful.

Mazer's poetry is pluralistic, estranged, willful, urgent; love, as Socrates said, is desire, hungry, ambitious, mad. Fear madness not, when genius and love are mad. There is a sublime restlessness to Mazer's work, a divine plurality and restlessness of contrasting hate and love haunting the dream of one.

The idea that art is merely imitative was rejected by late twentieth-century sophisticates—in vain.

Art is nothing but imitation—the abstract painters and the language poets are “representing” with their eyes shut. Imitation cannot help but be the aim. Closing our eyes, we still “see.” Art cannot escape its imitative role. Imitation and art are as synonymous as ever—the ancient, simple folly of imitation still belongs to us.

Mazer thinks as he clings to the breast of experience; Mazer seems to be in this life to spin his experience into poetry; the alchemy is brought about by pain; his hurt is our poetry. The rough-and-ready artisan, the grunting gardener, the logical architect, all escape pain by escaping into their work; the poet, Mazer, cannot escape—his work is himself: his thought is contemplated experience, experience contemplated, for its own sake. We see his experience—and experience's children—in his poetry. We see his thoughts breeding. As he writes in “Allegro quasi Largo”:

How to promote an exchange from here to there,
a sure guide for exigencies maintained
is a real problem in a dreamed elevator,
too real to let go of all resemblances,
despite being unable to recall, to muster a name.
Why then we were what we were before,
only I didn't tell you, and you didn't guess,
but now in the aftermath of that black mass
there's little to be done but that assuages,
and the miner gets no rest, in the deep mine.
And the dinner gets no reply, and the dish languishes.
Clean up this mess, O Son of God,
the better that my speech approacheth wholly
the forms and conditions of a prior approval,
that calling card or palm sized circular
that goes away, to get so much work done.
As long as you work, says the rushed hysterical voice,
then, I don't have to sit here, arrogant, indignant.

This passage is full of “experience,” but almost, it seems, stripped of it, as if the thought and emotion attached to it are what remain, to make it, in the reader's mind, richer. Mazer knows the reader cannot experience “experience” directly; he doesn't strain after simplified depiction, but lets the language be the experience, trusting language to produce new thoughts, which then contribute to a new experience in the reader's mind. Mazer's faith in language is just that, faith in his ability to use language. There is no self-conscious L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet's agenda—thank God.

The inability to communicate is real (“unable to recall, to muster a name”) and the horror of the “hysterical” and the “arrogant” is not simply done for effect.

Like Dante's Inferno, Mazer's poetry is impressive in design, and the realities tenanted there are sad, and not superficial.

The result of reading this is almost as if a highly advanced creature came into our being and took control of what is finest in us: to enrich our thinking—which is so beautiful (“the miner gets no rest, in the deep mine”)—that it does become our experience, for it is clear to us that Mazer's rhetoric is not the result of Mazer simply stringing together words, in the style of Ashbery. Mazer is producing a living record of an experience in the language of the poem itself. Obscure poetry produces no experience; simple poetry, a shadow of one experience. Mazer's poetry produces an experience in gaps that open up between obscurity and simplicity. The experience, which hides behind “words” in lesser poets, inhabits “words” produced by Mazer.

Ashbery's work is essentially a parody of the earnest prose “experience.”

Mazer is going into that “experience” with visionary tools never seen before.

Ambiguity of language covers up experience, as what experiences experience is in abeyance.

Mazer is bringing that which experiences experience into the experience, but not in such a manner that we lose the experience. It is sympathetic addition, rather than cynical filtering.

A word refers to an object, and can do so in two ways: cynically or simply; in the first instance, we don't trust the poet (Ashbery) and in the second, we don't trust the experience, because it is too superficially rendered. Ashbery doesn't want our trust; his cynicism is intentional. When you think he is being sincere, of course he is not being sincere—but if some phrase of Ashbery's appears to be poignant, you are ambushed by your own feeling of poignancy, and so Ashbery's cynicism is supreme: intentionally and accidentally. It is quite an achievement, as far as it goes.

Mazer follows Ashbery: the word is not trusted; but then Mazer goes one step further: the addition of a word now creates an experience which is finally trusted in an act of linguistic will imitating the world not cynically, but quite the opposite, sincerely , (it does not matter whether comically or tragically) in the Romantic mode, as opposed to the Modern one.

Mazer's task is a sincere and primitive one. Which is why his poetry is more sophisticated than the rest.

We care, we seek, we expect, we desire—at a certain safe, perhaps slightly terrifying, distance— experience in prose… “At noon the thief entered the hotel, etc.,” for example.

We are ambushed by experience itself in poetry—if the poet is good.

If the poet is good, we have the experience. The experience is ours.

In prose, the experience is “over there.”

In poetry, the experience enters us.

Mazer happens to possess, along with a great vocable fecundity, the austerity of noble reticence that refuses the easy help of metaphoric and analogous “truth.” He refuses to be seduced by metaphor (or to constantly indulge in parody), and goes that much deeper into experience (by the very reason of his calm refusal); with a use of language that is many-layered, he sacrifices rhetorical ease and metaphorical fluency for something much deeper.

Poetry is naturally informed by nostalgia—since, as a temporal art, it belongs to time, not imagery, which is at the heart of that metaphoric wreckage in which lesser poets die. Shakespeare, in his famous poem, immediately rejects the metaphoric agenda: “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” The answer is no, “thou art more lovely and more temperate…” We cannot possibly experience thee or summer's day in the sonnet. The poet wisely avoids the metaphoric effort, indulging instead in the iconic, “ this gives life to thee”: Remembrance of the lover in time. The reader is not Shakespeare's target; future readers are—and there lies the poem's frame in time, the very reason for the poem qua poem.

Mazer, the Neo-Romantic, is naturally Shakespearean. In the following passage, he does not fruitlessly compare New York and Rome (except as an idea introduced) but centers on the subjective and ephemeral experience of “entering” and “approaching” the cities, and uses rhyme to focus Rome as “home” and proceeds to contemplate Rome, New York and himself in “decay”:

Entering the city of New York,
is something like approaching ancient Rome,
to see the living people crawling forth,
each pipe and wire, window, brick, and home.

The times are sagging, and it is unreal
to know one's slice of mortal transient time.
We angle forward, stunned by what we feel,
like insects, incognizant of every crime.

We are so duped, who make up civilization
in images of emotions that we feel,
to know the ague of the mortal steel,
each one perched balanced at his separate station.

The graves are many, and their fields decay,
where nothing can be meant to stand forever.
No doubt in due course God will have his way,
and slowly, slowly, all our bonds dissever.

But we shall not be here to see it happen;
we will have left this world behind to others;
there is no silent power who is mapping
our hearts and wishes, or those of our brothers.

Lift high the head, and let the jaunty scarf
blow in the reckless wind of each new morning;
walk to the edge of each old well-used wharf
and see imprinted there time's towering warning.

The New York City which Mazer gives us is not personal, touristy or pedantic—it is his experience of one of the world's great cities—and the great city becomes a great experience in poetry, since Mazer, the poet, is up to it.

The world of art and literature split itself into distinct halves, as it defined itself for audiences of the last 200 years.

Crime literature—which first made its appearance with icy clarity in the detective stories of Poe, continued with Doyle, and is ubiquitous today—belongs to a populist faith that “the truth will out,” a pure, simple belief in answers and knowledge. Fiction guides us, like Ariadne's thread, out of the maze. Life may seem confusing, but this is mere seeming—detective, doctor, scientist, will eventually rip the veil from every mystery.

This, in a nutshell, is one half of the split world: optimistic and populist. Traditionally middlebrow.

Almost in reaction to this, as the great cell of Culture in the Modern era divides, we have the other half: highbrow, eclectic, experimental fiction and modern poetry. Neither side likes the other.

Poe and the whole genre of popular, boyish, optimistic Letters was oppressive to a whole class of pessimistic but educated readers, who acutely and even bitterly felt that populist, optimistic literature took a great deal for granted, overlooking, in its confident, scientific optimism, social problems breeding beneath the proud banners streaming proudly in the wind above Castle Poe.

There were crimes and illnesses, labeled as such, that were, in fact, a revolution in the making, life suppressed by the blithe upholders of world order.

Poe's “Conquerer Worm” was a metaphor for horror, and that horror was turned on its head: the metaphoric beauty of great literature exploded in a horror more horrible still—Realism! Grim depictions of social and domestic discontent.

Scientists and doctors did not expound truths, but revealed greater mysteries.

Faith devolved into doubt, love devolved into sex, verse devolved into prose, beauty devolved into artifice, adventure devolved into psychosis.

Modernism was not a grassroots rebellion but a highbrow one, in which the highbrow switched allegiances and began to identify with the unfinished, the chaotic, and the broken—stylistically. It wasn't that modern writers cared more—though that's what some might say. Poor countries and poor people found more of a voice. Perhaps. But we don't mean that. The aesthetic became moral.

The anti-hero sums up the impulse in which James Joyce replaced Victor Hugo as the Ur-writer.

The heroic, being a virtue, could have remained as a virtue, but the undermining of popular optimism was the agenda—and so took off in very strange directions.

The heroic has a certain amount of innocence, and when innocence comes under attack, the heroic suffers, and the good suffers: chastity is impugned for its innocence, beauty for its exclusivity and its fragility and its innocence. The flip occurred in intellectual circles; the gatekeepers became barbarians, which sums up the whole Modernist experiment, enlivened by the bitter breakup of the British Empire and the resentment of boyish, practical things, the America of Franklin and Washington; Poe's darkness was embraced, but rejected was Poe's scientific optimism—only the dark side was seen.

Leveling democracy and its rhetoric of victimhood made its move, cheered on, not by the poor, but aristocrats in the setting sun.

Mazer is rare because he seems to be aristocratic—but is not.

Mazer belongs to Romantic heroism—beaten down for a hundred years. Mazer began, but no longer belongs to, the Modernist ascendancy. He is helping to reshape it.

Mazer studied with Seamus Heaney, who was not aristocratic. Mazer learned from Christopher Ricks, an aristocratic apologist, but Mazer needed to learn it all, and he did. He went out west and met Landis Everson, who represents another strand in the tapestry of Letters.

Mazer belongs to Romanticism—one crushed underfoot by the Modernist experiment; but Mazer has come out on the other side—a new creature, a new poet arriving at a new shore, to something finally more aesthetically and calmly heroic than Modernism and all its desperate, contradictory pain, and yet Mazer is modern.

New York City is not sugarcoated or falsely praised by Mazer, and yet we don't get a sordid or petulantly cynical view of the great city, either. We feel, today, looking at Mazer's New York, as if we were looking at Rome. If poetry today can reverberate with the sublimity of a Shelley, it is not, we think, a bad thing, everything else being equal. An ode to New York City, as Mazer has written it, is a Romantic trope; the ode is understood to be praise (though it's more than that) and a poet seeking this kind of poetic “glory” in a too obvious and direct way takes a great risk, today, since Romanticism belongs to a different historical era—one in which Greece and Rome had weight; learning, art, and these sorts of things could be glorious without irony, if the poet were in a certain mood.

It is touchstones both universal and elevated which let the poet soar into realms of pure, elitist, universal expression without apology. A poem constructed of such, emitted of such, does not have to mean anything more than what it means in a practical sense: New York City is seen not as larger than life, nor diminished because of modern ironies; it is simply seen as New York City by a poet who chooses to look at it fully in its face. Odd, really, that this even counts as something remarkable, what Mazer has done; and yet, it is, and he has.

Mazer's New York City is a remarkable immensity, which quickly makes him feel lonely and small, so that the sublime belongs to the way in which he meets the city's gaze, with a meditation on oblivion and death. The city is both a living thing of such dimensions that it overwhelms, and a symbol of death. Mazer has elevated himself as a poet to greet the city poetically in the metiér of Romanticism and the sublime.