Lucifer: A Hagiography

Philip Memmer is the author of two previous books of poems, Threat of Pleasure and Sweetheart, Baby, Darling as well as three chapbooks of poetry. His work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Tar River Poetry, Epoch, and other journals, and also in several anthologies, including 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. He is Associate Editor for Tiger Bark Press, and the founder and director of the Downtown Writer’s Center, the Syracuse affiliate of the YMCA National Writer’s Voice. He lives in the rural village of Deansboro, New York, with his wife and two children.

With unflagging inventiveness and mordant wit, Philip Memmer’s Lucifer: A Hagiography explores the not-inconsiderable span of time between just before Creation and the End of Days, as experienced by God the Father’s other son. The cosmos that Memmer creates is both singularly strange and strangely familiar, and the character of Lucifer, a kind of existential hero for all time, instructs and delights us equally.

—Charles Martin, author of Where the River Ends

 

Review in Neo Magazine, issue 9, by Judith Harris

Philip Memmer’s new book Lucifer: A Hagiography, was recently awarded the Idaho Prize for Poetry 2008, and comprises a book-length poem on the life of Lucifer—as compiled by multiple sources—that could be considered something of a postmodern epic. Memmer’s Lucifer is a rare poetic sequence, given the fact that poetic sequences are anything but rare these days in current books of contemporary poetry. But what distinguishes Memmer as a first class thinker, as well as an excellent poetic craftsman, is that he is not simply being a ventriloquist, or putting words into his historical or mythic or biblical speakers’ mouths, pretty or unpretty; as he scales the historical trajectory of the Lucifer story, he is actually creating an interpretation as he goes. I don’t say this lightly. The existential interpretation of Genesis might well end (if it ever begins) in stalemate—as with Beckett’s plays, where noprogress is made without backtracking into oblivion. And, in fact, I would argue that the oeuvre of Memmer, from Sweetheart, Baby, Darling to Threat of Pleasure, dares to delicately reveal the tragic paradox of the human condition in deceptively accessible poems that simultaneously entertain and devastate us through a calculated, yet often visionary set of implausible conditions characteristic of the modern ennui one might find in the suburban malaise of Raymond Carver’s fiction. But Memmer’s aim isn’t limited to depiction or even interpretation; it is aiming at knowledge itself. In a poem entitled “Knowledge” (Threat of Pleasure), the Socratic speaker confronts the logic of the logician (or rhetorician), imposing upon the latter baffling truth that some explanations for why human beings suffer are beyond mortal comprehension. Furthermore, nothing follows as sequentially as the teleological thinker thinks,

Whatever else is true
the coals feel hotter than ever
as darkness begins to do

what darkness does.”

Instead, there are broad gaps in our understanding, and we must give pause to the potential of the momentary to open up, temporally and spatially, and bring the ancient into the present.

In his earlier books, Memmer is a true postmodernist, imposing the relics of a civilization onto the landscape of the current world, and the fragmentation of our objective and subjective understanding nto a new form of mosaic. In this manner, he encourages the reader to rethink the possibility of a world that can’t, like Heaven, be anything but the result of one superimposition onto another, as myth perpetuates its own fiction of the reality of the world. Consistent with postmodern tenets is Memmer’s articulation of what could be chaotic (and should be chaotic), since everything is lacking a center, and yet, the cogent, an elegantly phrased couplet, or quatrain, employed as a formal framing in many of the poems suggests a containment, or control. This allows the reader to work completely through the emotional dimensions of the poem, which are never directly expended, but which linger in this neutral space of doubt. Doubt is a human response to any form of received knowledge, or ideological premise, or history. As each layer of narrative eventually peels itself away, yet another potential story is exposed. 

For example in a poem entitled “The Paleontologist’s Blind Date” (Threat of Pleasure), the poet, like any good storywriter, presents us with a situation which has to be untangled or resolved—inviting the reader to participate in the detective work. Here, we have a paleontologist who has found his “dream date” by happenstance—he has found the speaker, who is fossil-like, holding within her all of the knowledge that the paleontologist seeks. Yet, as is true of all ontological study, the origin of origins is always fated to refer to some precedent—on and on into infinitude. Within the constraints imposed upon human existence, Memmer finds all the freedom an existentialist can choose to act upon, which results in the choices  eventually made in art. Memmer is not just a realist; he is a realist. Thus sensual imagery, so often the crux of the conventional contemporary poem, is merely part of the pursuit, but not at all the fulfillment of the pursuit:

after this touch
he would know me

years from now, even
in the dark, even

without my skin. Thank you, I smile—then close the door
and never call him again.

Here, Memmer humorously interrogates the meaning of meaning, and forecloses our hope that salvation is possible in the ruins of human faith, in a divine principle more perfect than we are—an arbiter of eternal life and a liberator of our souls. But this is not to say that piety is not palpable in Lucifer: A Hagiography. Not unlike Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, the role of the imagination is paramount to understanding and connection; knowledge is dubious because knowledge as power is what got Adam and Eve in trouble in the first place. 

Lucifer is divided into five sections, taking us from the beginning of his inception as an angel nurtured by the Word, through his own development and relationship with God and God’s decisions regarding what to make man from, to Lucifer’s fall from the heavens into the drama of human life. Lucifer, according to Memmer’s revisioned history of Genesis, is not a bad sort at all, but another one of God’s misunderstandings when it comes to dealing with mortality. 

Before discussing the highlights of this wonderful excursion into the space of time between just before Creation and the End of Days, as experienced by Lucifer, we must remember that Lucifer’s role in our cosmology has been disputable. Yet, we know that Lucifer is God’s other son. The heaven Memmer creates in Lucifer is a postmodern blankness that resists imagery, or rather never completely saturates itself in imagery, reminding me of the first of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, in which the sound vanishes the moment the piper pipes, keeping the unknowable space of God’s Heaven beyond any human comprehension, only to instill a sense of blind awe. 

The first poem establishes a version of the Catechism, emphasizing the irony of God having questions himself:

and on the day when Lucifer
was born, God found himself
full of questions—

As is true of Blake’s “The Tyger,” Lucifer is the necessary counterpart to Christ; if Lucifer did not exist, Christ would be an illogical manifestation of the Word. 

The poems are arable, beautiful, and arranged in a way that is suspenseful in plot. They serve the reader’s curiosity in a way that a book of sequential poems typically does not—given the sequence’s natural tendency to repeat the same theme. But in Lucifer, I found only a few moments in which the urge to finish the book in one sitting ebbed a bit, but then was quickly stirred again. Memmer’s poignant use of economy and compression is an achievement. In “Lucifer Makes a Snow Angel,” he opens the poem with this stanza: 

You cannot imagine the white
of the snows of Heaven. 
Even to try is a sin.

Again, the irrefutable irony—verbal, situational, and dramatic—is comparable to Blake’s songs, such as “The Chimney Sweeper.” God’s insistence on opaqueness doesn’t fend well when Lucifer wants to know more about why he has sabotaged mankind by creating death as well as life. The double irony is that we must infer it is the same reason God created both Lucifer and Christ, Lucifer translating to the “Morning Sun” or falling star, as Christ is the ascending one. 

“The First Days” is a sequence within a sequence, and begins on the same note of a postmodern void that must be filled because it is a void “of something.” As Memmer writes:

Lucifer followed his Father to the edge 
where Heaven stopped and nothingness began, 
and saw the usual blank had been replaced 
with varied forms of cruelty and dark:

From here on in, we are given an eyewitness account of the spherical trajectory of heaven and earth. As M.L. Smoker writes, “The paradox remains the same—so much is at stake in these poems, and so little—but Memmer has managed to give us an original and remarkable passageway.” I have looked up the word “remarkable” in Webster’s Dictionary to close this review. It defines “remarkable” as worthy of notice, and as extraordinary and uncommon. This is a book that is singular in its style, appeal, and brilliance. I can’t recommend it more highly.

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