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Destroyer and Preserver

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Matthew Rohrer

March 2011

Michael Flatt

If you’re like me, the title Destroyer and Preserver will make you expect a speaker who finds himself filling both roles at once, somehow. You’ll long to embrace the conflict of some tragic irony. You’ll look forward to witnessing small, tender moments nestling together in the shadow of something supremely horrible.

If you’re like me, the title Destroyer and Preserver will make you expect a speaker who finds himself filling both roles at once, somehow. You’ll long to embrace the conflict of some tragic irony. You’ll look forward to witnessing small, tender moments nestling together in the shadow of something supremely horrible.

And if you’re like me, you’ll have a hard time not being a touch disappointed in Matthew Rohrer’s new collection, but you’ll find something equally compelling in his speaker’s thought-out resignation. This collection seems to say, “The world is awful, but what can I do? Give $50 to Planned Parenthood and eat a date with bleu cheese spread on it.”

I suspect this is a mentality that would incite some resentment among the revolutionarily minded among us, and I must confess to some of this resentment. And yet, what exactly do I do? I give Planned Parenthood money regularly (something I have in common with this speaker), and I try to live my life the best that I can. I have no great plans to improve the world aside from by living my own life responsibly. The difference is, Rohrer’s speaker expounds this as an ideal, while I find myself a bit ashamed not to be starting a revolution on behalf of any of a number of worthy causes. For Rohrer, there’s a genuine commitment to this resignation. The collection’s concluding poem, “Wu Wei” (which also features that delicious snack I mentioned before) puts it this way:

…Like given
the choice to do something
stupid or to sit in a chair
everyone leaps up
with their eyes ablaze
he said, when the greatest
art is to turn back…

When I consider this passage, I feel as ambivalent as I do about the rest of the book. Perhaps this “he” has a point. Maybe there’s something to the idea of not choosing one’s battles, but choosing, consistently, to remain seated. Maybe Sweden had it right.

But then, is there anything inherently stupid about dropping everything and using your accumulated vacation time to drive to Tuscaloosa and help with the cleanup effort? Probably not. And while Rohrer seems very conscious of his speaker’s privileges, and perhaps selfishness—it isn’t an accident that his characters discuss this idea over brunch, as so many of us do—it still strikes me as a dangerous worldview: “How awful. Oh well.”

Though, it might make sense to assume I’m wrong about Rohrer’s stance on the self’s ideal relationship to world politics, and to just enjoy some well crafted poems. What has always attracted me to Rohrer’s poems is working better than I have ever seen it. His angular, juxtaposition-based approach to narrative and his commitment to the quotidian—the everyday-made-new—show his interest in New York School poetics. And as he did in his improvised collaborations with Joshua Beckman, Rohrer again demonstrates an enviable ease and deftness within this style. The best example may be “Two Hours of Crying,” a truly beautiful ode to parenthood—the title refers to a baby’s crying—which ends:

I must keep myself awake or
be visited with horrors. My love
hurtling toward me through vast subway
tunnels in one hour & twenty minutes.
I am a dream a black obelisk dreams
& forgets I haven’t
put much thought into it. I just feel good.

In a sense, in poems such as this one, Rohrer actually provides what his title might suggest. Here, he preserves his family in the face of potential horrors, and love is a thing both fast and threatening, a destroyer.

While one finds a similarly pleasing irony in “The Terrorists,” in which a terrorist “walks into a bar” and is healed by his first taste of beer, finding that “it was all of a big joke beauty / played on love,” it’s hard to believe that this is really all Rohrer has to say on a matter like terrorism.

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