Mine Eclogue by Jacob Kahn, Roof Books, 2022

I begin this review by merely quoting the first lines of Jacob Kahn’s Mine Eclogue firstly because the seductive enticement and gentle rhythm of its tripartite structure pulls a reader from question to command to promise. This is a book that draws you in, one that does not assume its reader’s degree of familiarity but actually plants that seed and cultivates it, by means of a strong lyric voice that both celebrates and deprecates itself while constantly reaching out to the larger world and other poetic traditions for grounding. As the title suggests, these poems are classical and imitative while also being decisively Kahn’s, animated by the particular concerns of his milieu and aware of their ancient lineage. These poems will ask you questions with full anticipation of your response, playing with rhetoric while also situating it within the theater of everyday life rather than the elevated discourse of poetry. In other words, they are speechy while being squarely trained on the archness and oddness of speech as it’s actually used.

But Kahn’s lines quoted above also beautifully pose a pertinent question: how to reconcile poetry’s pleasures and joys with its complicities and failures. The regardlessness of our happy lilting suggests both that it will continue despite inhabiting an austere and precarious world which does not nurture poetic practice, as well as suggesting that it may continue without proper regard or concern for its many harmful omissions and assumptions. The word lilt, which now refers to a pleasant swinging rhythm of speech or music, comes from the Middle English lulte, which means to sound an alarm, and thus its use here perfectly encapsulates the undecidable question as to whether poetry smooths over or gives voice to the ongoing crises of capitalist society and our particular conjuncture within it.

But there are two kinds of song, perhaps arranged contrapuntally, in Kahn’s opening lines: the lilt and the chorus. Part of his gambit, I think, is that if you are willing to lilt along with him, the various songs may form a chorus. This chorus emerges through the deep intertextuality of his poems with the various Bay Area lineages he claims, from the feminist, Language poetry of Norma Cole and Jean Day to the more recent return to lyricism in the work of Brandon Brown and Sophia Dahlin. Many of these poems are written for or after poets who share many of the concerns I outlined in my previous paragraph, but I detect something a little different in how Kahn approaches these questions, namely that he approaches them by means of asking more questions, and I came to love this sense that a poem must be more curious and more open in order to join the larger chorus.

Mine Eclogue’s questions keep coming in the poem “Sylvan Ditty”: “Have you read the Eclogues is / a gauche question I get but have / you read it??” The force of the question here is strong enough to overcome the embarrassment of asking it, elegantly shedding the pretense of poetic lineage by means of both self-deprecation as well as a genuine curiosity and desire to share. When Kahn connects the politics of land use and ownership in the first Eclogue to modern phenomenon like right-wing separatist movements (“there were those separatists, remember, / the Bundy clan?”) as well as the movement to defend Indigenous lands against the ongoing state-sanctioned project of forced displacement (“Standing Rock / anyone?”), he does so in each case by asking a question, leaving open the question as to whether we can read Virgil as more useful to us or to our opponents.

Of course, questions in poems do not need to be, perhaps even cannot be, answered. One of the ways that Kahn gets to have his cake and eat it too in this book is by framing the songster and the cynic as flirts who enjoy annoying each other rather than as mortal enemies. This dynamic reaches fever pitch in “Eclogue: Reprise,” which ends with a tremendous crescendo:

Here, negativity is a perverse kind of public service, keeping the public notified of the horrors lying unnoticed underneath their feet, although one of those horrors is the serpentine poet himself, whose song (whether it sounds the alarm or pleasantly lilts) is poison, pollution. If there is a kind of ecopoetics in Mine Eclogue, it’s a dirty one, primarily focused on poetry’s tendency towards extraction and waste. But “Eclogue: Reprise” is ultimately a love poem, as is clear both in this excerpt as well as in its opening lines which figure love as a kind of hazardous material: “Daphnis, no, I don’t / want to know what love is / but I bet we’ve already / been exposed.” Kahn addresses the purported inventor of pastoral poetry only to brush off its assumption that love offers some respite, as well as the thought that there might be any respite from love itself.

What I love about “Eclogue: Reprise” is that it so operatically proves the truth of the line that closes the earlier poem, “Agrarian Capitalism”: “The base lyric is dispossession / As moral protest is the greatest pleasure of man.” If moral protest against empire is the greatest pleasure, greater even than bad TV, wine, or weed, then we need to reconsider the supposed divide that separates the righteous asp from the mellow Greek, look more closely at the vanishing point between those two asymptotically approaching lines. According to this logic, the venomous killjoy is even more of a hedonist than the happy loungers that serve as the unwitting victims of their incendiary critiques, and indeed their supreme pleasure must come at others’ expense. Kahn is clear that moral protest against empire often can’t help but cast some of its ire on the friends and neighbors who populate its terrain:

Again, tropes of poison and contamination serve to describe not the fallen world but instead the inner faith and spirit which drives the lyric voice to drown out all others with its righteous song. It’s a critique of virtue-signaling, sure, but it goes deeper than that. Unlike those who feign that their moral outrage emerges from a sense of upstanding dutifulness, Kahn’s poet enjoys his moralism fully and selfishly rather than merely broadcasting it, allowing him to bring its logic to completion and indicate its limits. Part of this enjoyment involves an acknowledgment that moralizing feels good because it comes at others’ expense, rather than uplifting them. It may be that the chorus mentioned above is more discordant than one might have imagined, that its power as well as its pleasure derives from its many interlocking antagonisms. With this suggestion, Mine Eclogue offers a surfeit of pleasure (without apology or qualification) alongside a ferocious statement of political demands, while also asking quite genuinely whether it’s all we really want.

I’m trying to keep these claims subjunctive; I do think it’s quite important that most of Kahn’s thinking takes place speculatively and inquisitively (the indulgent decisiveness of “Eclogue: Reprise” is the naughty, delightful exception). In “Eclogue II: Deepwater Horizon,” he asks “What is appetite anyway?” and gives the answer “Annoying eating sounds, dedication / to a false promise,” but he’s also opening the floor to our answers. It would be a great shame, indeed, to reduce Kahn’s poetry to a mere vehicle for a singular and definitive argument, and he counsels against such a reading in “Top Result Eclogue” when he writes: “To intend a song is not to sing it.” To the extent that I am guilty of such a reduction in my review, I have done it for my own pleasure, with faith that its excessiveness will produce leftovers for those who prefer to delectate in the same way.

Many other reviews could be written of this book, ones which might opt to focus more on, say, the ups and downs of its singsong harmonies or its hilarious, tender explorations of masculinity and the scatological. (As an aside, whenever someone eventually edits a volume of the many poems which have been written over these past years in memory of Kevin Killian, I hope they include Kahn’s “Kevin, Come Back.”) This book is a chorus in itself, and one that asks for other voices to join. The pleasure it takes in its own complaint is deliberately self-indulgent, but it is too curious and outgoing to be exclusionary; these poems flirtatiously dare you to kvetch back, even if it ends up being at their expense.