Improvisation Without Accompaniment Review by Caleb Braun

Improvisation Without Accompaniment

By Matt Morton

BOA Editions

Publication Date: April 7, 2020 

ISBN: 978-1-942683-95-7

84 pages

$17

The Instruction of Delight

On Matt Morton’s Improvisation Without Accompaniment

Review by Caleb Braun

A succinct, often repeated explanation for the purpose of poetry comes from the ancient teacher, Horace: to “instruct and delight.” One way to read Matt Morton’s Improvisation Without Accompaniment, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Prize from BOA Editions, is as a set of instructions. “The manner in which one begins is of utmost importance” initiates, for example, “Elegy for my Brother in the Wilderness,” the gorgeous, ten-sectioned poem at the center of the book. Or in “Improvisation Containing Trace Elements”:

………………………………………………………………My advice

………………if you find yourself off-route in an icy couloir,

………………    consider the implications before

    ……………… ……………… you proceed.

And from “Viewfinder,” “Listen: there is no use looking back.” And yet, what overshadows the speaker’s desire to both give and receive instruction in these poems is their sheer pleasure, their delight in language and the world. 

The introductory poem, “Republic,” fittingly presages the books persistent themes: pageantry, trains, the potency and elusiveness of language, and the pressure of mortality on the making of a self. Here is how the poem opens:

………………Again the chorus gathers on the stage.

………………………………Again again because what does not tend

………………………………toward repetition, in hopes of prolonging its stay?

Morton’s poetry moves beyond the cliché argument that language is empty; he explores the power of language itself to describe, determine, and perhaps to provide hope to our lives. The poem continues:

………………Each day begins by promising a clear-cut expedition, but

………………………………by evening I find myself perplexed, unsure of what

………………………………meaning means, or why meanness—which means

………………differently—so easily enters the heart

………………………………but takes a lifetime to root out. Finite

………………………………infinitives: to sail, to sing, to sigh. If I seem to be

………………fascinated by trains, it is because I was born

………………………………on a desert planet were there were none, oh to speed

………………………………through evergreens in search of a focal point . . .

Central to Morton’s project is this journey of self-discovery, which, as it repeats each day, can become tiresome. The promise of each day ends with night, death, the failure of language to change anything. “We assemble from our succession of voyages history” Morton’s speaker reminds us, “as in the reenactment, in which each god chooses a side.” We are “tethered / to whichever plan has been assigned” to us, each on a proverbial bullet train toward the same destination. It’s this sense of inevitability that spurns the speaker of Morton’s poems to improvisation. Is it even possible, the poems ask, to make from our lives, our language, something unique? For we are not gods, “who, being gods, had so little to lose.” We have everything to lose. Death separates humans from the gods, and this knowledge of death creates both pressure and uncertainty. In the face of such loss, how can we make our lives meaningful? 

Accordingly, Morton’s book both attempts to provide instructions for a good life and dramatizes a self’s search for them. “At times, I would like a manual,” he begins in “The Good Life,” and this desire for an answer to life’s hard questions weaves its way throughout the book. What saves this book from being too desperate or despairing is Morton’s ability to inhabit and argue for the other part of Horace’s formula: delight. Despite the familial haunting, the sense of loss, and the mistrust of language throughout the book, a deep delight, an enduring pleasure runs below each poem like a stream. The emptiness of pageantry is often balanced by how fun we all have dressing up for a show. Yes, language locks us into roles, into modes of thinking, but it can be fun to don such attire and to see what it shows us. What we can be. 

“Delight can be drawn / from the smallest things” the speaker reminds us in “Improvisation after Keats,” and the poems enact that pleasure in the ordinary. A carousel, a penny kaleidoscope, Ferris wheels, imaginary Chinese lanterns, even an ordinary conversation with a friend are all occasions for delight and meaningful living in these poems. And yet, Morton realizes that 

………………………………………………these pale

………………when measured against the gleaming

………………monolith the mind constructs in sleep,

………………or daydreams in the striped awning’s shade.

Thus, the poem becomes both an homage to Keats’s provocation in “This Living Hand” as well as an argument akin to Dickinson’s in “To make a prairie (1755)”: 

………………To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

………………One clover, and a bee.

………………And every.

………………The revery alone will do,

………………If bees are few. 

Similarly, Morton’s poem concludes: “If you stop, if you squint at the carousel, / the metal horses could almost be alive.” Morton’s speaker, if jaded at times, still believes in the poetic imagination. These are poems that believe in poetry, in revery, in the spell of language to transform. Poetry, in this poem and the book as a whole, becomes the surest guide to meaning. His poems are experiences that prove that poetry, in the words of Wallace Stevens, “helps us to live our lives.” 

His affinity with John Ashbery and A.R. Ammons is clear: here is a mind at work, negotiating the personal feeling (anxiety, depression, joy, love) with high thought influenced by philosophy and religion (or its apparent absence). As with Ashbery, Ammons, Dean Young, and other of Morton’s influences, the poems revel in associative movement and change. There are times when it seems he loses the line, the hook is cast off too far. “Do you understand / what it is I am saying?” Morton asks in “Not the Wind, Not the View,” and at times the answer is no, or it seems the speaker is not trying for mutual understanding at all. But never do I read parody or unearned emotion—there is neither the too-distant irony or sentimentality that plague much of contemporary poetry. Morton opts for Whitman’s untranslatability rather than the more common contemporary technique of completely obscuring the argument or reaching for an obvious emotion—often a grievance. Like Ashbery, Ammons, and even Ovid, Morton’s poems transform. If the current image isn’t sufficing, transform it a different image or a kaleidoscope of images. Your brother is struck by your own hand, your father is dying in the hospital, “mortal your lot—not mortal your desire,” “there were no Chinese lanterns,” (“Elegy for My Brother in the Wilderness”) what now? 

What’s both enlightening and pleasurable about these poems is their willingness to explore the depths of anxiety and loss, but also not to end there. Even if the refusal of total despair means inventing a mirage, a pageant, a show, a roll for the self we don’t quite believe. Further, Morton is willing, toward the end of the book, to strip back even the comfort of that costume:

………………… the brilliance

of the irony struck you again: this big project

of self-making we embarked on years ago,

without quite understanding what it was.

Countless dress rehearsals, hours

spent buttressing our mirrored egos,

frantically rechecking the inventoried rations, only to learn

the very thing called for was not a skyward climb,

but a stripping away.

Because, for our purposes, the view is there

to be taken in—neon arboretums, ghost town

theater marquees, dust devils, prairie squalls

and all the mountains hurtling up into pink

and blue clouds. It’s okay to enjoy

the shifting kaleidoscope of scenery,

to sit still and be quiet

for a while, settling into our roles once more

on this, our journey west, toward the sea.

………………“The Expedition”

Even as they challenge and dupe us, what we are given—our roles, our identities, the natural world, our experiences—are all we really have to help us along our journey of mortality. Indeed, one of the arguments of Morton’s book is that delight is the instruction. Even in our darkest moments, joy is available to us; our attention can draw out that pleasure and give our lives meaning. 

The power of Morton’s poetry adheres in how it transforms the ordinary—a suburban town, a non-descript building, a clouded sky above Federal Hill—into art that transcends what is given. Through the idiosyncratic movement of his particular mind, Morton renders experience that may not necessarily be unique: a sibling dispute; an ill parent; anxiety about death and loss; the uncertainties of romantic love when young; “this big project / of self-making we embarked on years ago”; into poems that carry the authority of myth and offer at least the possibility of living a good life “on this, our journey west, toward the sea” (“The Expedition”). Thus, the instructions aren’t always necessarily clear, but they are deep, lasting. And the delight of this first book even more so; overshadowed, only, perhaps, by the promise of more work in the future. 

Caleb Braun earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington where he received the Harold Taylor Prize. He is a PhD student in creative writing at Texas Tech University. His poems have appeared and are forthcoming in Image, The Crab Orchard Review, Cherry Tree, The Atlanta Review, and elsewhere.