Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, appears early on in Arkansas Tech University professor Paul Lake’s latest collection of poetry, The Republic of Virtue (University of Evansville Press, $15). “Martyr of Modernity” is an iteration of what’s probably an apocryphal story - the legend that the scientist conducted one final experiment upon the scaffold:
… To see
How long a brain could live deprived of blood,
He asked a friend to mount the guillotine
And lift his severed head and count his blinks
Before all thought devolved to chemistry,
Then bravely gazed until the last: thirteen
There are all sorts of ways to impeach this story: Lavoisier was among 28 enemies of the people beheaded in just 35 minutes that bloody day, and it seems unlikely his “friend” could have carried out such a final request had he tried. So far as I know, there’s no contemporary account to support it, and Google research returns the assertion that the story only began circulating in the 1990s. It sounds like a conflation of myths about Charlotte Corday - murderer of Jean-Paul Marat (who played a large role in Lavoisier’s story) - and an experiment conducted by a French doctor who witnessed the execution of a murderer named Languille in 1905. Corday’s executioner is said to have slapped her head immediately after her execution, which caused her eyes to snap in his direction and her expression to slide from one of shock to a glower; Languille’s head reportedly reacted when the doctor called his name. There are stories of eyes blinking as many as 30 times after the heads have been separated from the bodies - but the consensus of most scientists these days is that those movements are just the firing of surprised neurons, and that consciousness doesn’t linger more than a second or two after the head comes off.
(That’s what they say, anyway. Others argue for the indestructibility of consciousness.)
Maybe none of that matters as far as the poem is concerned. What Lake does here, in 10 decasyllabic lines, is craft a little portrait of an incorruptible man who died needlessly to satisfy the blood lust of the mob. (His friend, the mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange - who witnessed the execution and in some versions of the legend is alleged to be “the friend assigned to count the blinks” - said, “It took them only an instant to cut off that head, but France may not produce another like it in a century.”)
In just 100 syllables, we are given the essence of Lavoisier, the man who figured out what water was, who wished his friend Ben Franklin could have been a moderating force in France’s revolution, who wrote to his cousin from prison to joke that the guillotine would at least save him from “the troubles of old age.”
Lake concentrates in his poem a couple of biographies’ worth of notions about Lavoisier and the wantonness of revolutions. This is what poets do. They distill oceans of ideas into a teacup. Poems can condense a cosmos of ideas and emotions into a freighted singularity.
Much of Lake’s slim 68-page book considers the relationship of language to the messy business of being human. Lake works in traditional modes with an uncommon precision and ear for rhythm.He’s an advocate of form - of meter and rhyme - in poetry. While a poem such as “Pro Forma” - which chides free-verse practitioners, dismissing their work as shoddy craftsmanship (it brings to mind Mark Knopfler’s song “In the Gallery,” which similarly mocked expressionism and other “trendy” art movements) - might seem self-serving and a little churlish, the poem itself is a small gem; a crafted heirloom box.
Lake’s critique of academia, from “Epilogue to ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’” - The second weaver scissored air And mimicked weaving on his frames
So well, he earned a tenured chair And now employs his language games To show what lies beneath all texts Is nothingness, or an illusion.
Revolt’s the last thing one expects Of children tutored in confusion. - leaves little doubt as to where he stands in the ongoing culture wars.
Still, the book is far from a polemic. Some of its best moments are observational and tender as well as clear-eyed. His lead-off poem, “First Fruit,” is about the curse of being human (and knowing all must die); his second, “The Ballroom of Heaven,” could serve as a treatment for a heartbreaking film about the author’s father’s life.
I lit upon “Martyr of Modernity” because I know a little about Lavoisier. Flicking across the page, my eye snagged on it, and so I read the poem. Which led me to read the others. Unfortunately, it’s that sort of randomness that leads us to some books and away from others.
However accessible his work may be, Lake is not ever likely to be considered a flavor of the month - in these post-literate times, what poet is? But relevant obscurity is no signifier of mediocrity. Lake’s a major poet, a strong intelligence not much given to compromise.
A little, at least, like Lavoisier.
It seems rather a shame to relegate a review of a collection of Ellen Gilchrist short stories to a few inches at the bottom of a column, but the alternative is to make no mention at all of Acts of God (Algonquin, $23.95). And that would seem the bigger shame, for there are ample pleasures available in Gilchrist’s consistently well-tempered prose.
While a few of the stories in Acts of God, all of which involve her, may test one’s tolerance for sentimentality (“Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” struck me as a little smug), Gilchrist is a consistently readable storyteller. She manufactures memorable and beguiling characters - like Rhoda Manning, her recurrent Southern belle turned lady writer, who shows up here to engage in an epistolary exchange that’s funnier than most and that ends up on the Passive-Aggressive Notes website - and plausibly rendered worlds. When she’s at her best, as she is in the title story and “Collateral,” about an accounting instructor deployed with her National Guard unit to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Gilchrist is a remarkable stylist, clean and energetic.
Even when she gets a little sweet, she’s a remarkable observer of Southern manners.
Finally, I want to note the publication of Tom Horn: In Life and Legend (University of Oklahoma Press, $29.95) by Larry D. Ball, professor emeritus of history at Arkansas State University at Jonesboro. Honesty compels me to note that I haven’t finished this exhaustive biography of the 19th-century Western lawman-turned-outlaw. Most of my previous knowledge of Horn comes via the fairly whimsical 1980 Steve McQueen movie.
Still, it’s next up on the nightstand. Horn is a fascinating character who, at 16, helped track Geronimo and was hanged in 1903 for the murder of a 14-year-old boy. Horn’s guilt is still a matter of contention, and I’ll confess I skipped ahead to see where Ball landed on the subject. He seems to think the egotistical Horn talked the jury into a conviction, although the evidence was inconclusive.
Email:pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Style, Pages 53 on 04/13/2014