The Triumph of Frank Bidart

The creation of necessitousness (not need! but the feeling of being necessary) in poetry bathes the inevitability of the poetic line in the moonshine of desire– of passionately feeling that some thing must be this way (or that). Creating this requires that the poet put down the words in such a way that the elixir sinks into them. But what does the relationship of inevitability to intoxication tell us about the strength and weakness, power and vulnerability, of desire? Frank Bidart has distilled a treasure-tub of responses to this question, over a near-half-century career, unpacking the question with technique, reformulating it in the structure of the poetic line, asking careful readers to ask ourselves: what is this poetry we create when we succumb to the need to need?

Bidart’s first book of poetry, Golden State, collecting poems of 1965-73, brought together a confessional series of family poems with a disruptive entry of dramatic monologue– testing the boundary between the field of the poem as an artifact of life and the field of the poem as a study of possibility. Integrating the chaos of possibility as a dissolvent to the solidity of the past, the book additionally drained history with snippets of conversation, letters, extensions, notes; larnin’ for the reader that the work of bringing these elements together was accomplished by the desire that they should cohere– that they should be together.

But the melding force between the speaker and the character is not just a desire to become. The two go together in the mere desire to be. That the line should be as it is, set down and set forth as a testament of history, IS the risky attempt– the hold of and shape of history– that opens Bidart’s field to the entries and excursions of history as possibility, going either this way or that, drawing on the devastating power of desire to generate reality: what you love (we learn from Bidart) is your fate.

Six books of poetry later– The Book of the Body (1977), The Sacrifice (1983), In the Western Night (1990), The First Hour of the Night (1990), Desire (1997), Star Dust (2005), and Watching the Spring Festival (2008)–Frank Bidart’s triumph is desire itself, the sticky pour of fate and love into the basin of the poetic line. From “The Return,” in Desire: