“A Lean, Mean Read, or Therefore Just Average?”: A Review of Matthew Tierney’s Probably Inevitable

Let’s go downtown and talk to the modern kids

They will eat right out of your hand

Using great big words that they don’t understand

—Arcade Fire, “Rococo”

Probably Inevitable, Matthew Tierney’s third book of poetry, or shall we say third rock ballad from the Sol, is, much like Ryan Reynolds’ litterbox Definitely, Maybe, a rom-com for our post-dotcom dot-dot-dot—albeit set in outer-space. Or rather, type-set in the mindset of outer space. The romance between two humans, however “cocooned” as each is “in [its] sample size of one / by noise cancelling headphones,” is a synecdoche for humanity’s (b)Romance with the “Impossible ... ginorm[ity]” (italics his) of Existence and Mr. Big U itself (where yes, the Universe, the University-snacked knowledge of the Universe, and human Philosophy powering these poems form a mathematical identity).

The odyssey begins with the cute “Speed Dating in the Milky Way,” in which a lyrical self-narrating “I” contemplates, Harold Crick- or Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse-like, the “ovals” of his “lower limbs” pedalling the product-placed “Schwinn Elliptical” machine in a public body-disciplining facility, only to spy carnivorously a sexually desirable “you,” whose “metabolism might be free later / for a gourmet burger and low-watt rom-com.” The odyssey ends with “Cast in Order of Appearance,” in which they finally (Probably Inevitable-ly?) get to the movie. A filmic image of “ellipses across the linoleum” complements the “ovals” of the book’s opening, and the adage Love conquers all is affirmed in as many words for both the “sample size of one” and for humanity en gros alike: “because she is expendable and you are not” and because “Consciousness makes the universe.” Thus the Universe is reduced to a Hollywood/math formula. This, for Tierney, is the modern human impulse: “we / try to contain immensities of scale with a word like ginormous” because “we’ve lost the means to live restfully / without code.” But if he critiques that impulse to codify, the form of his book overwhelmingly belies the gesture.

Between the rom-com book-ends and the arbitrary, nondescript numeral assignations of the book-parts, lie a series of mostly lyrical and/or observational-comedy poems or sketches narrated mostly by a series of lyrical “I”s probably-inevitably-supposed-to-be-reducible-to the book’s author. Instead of “violence solv[ing] for x,” reader solves for “I.” It’s hilarious to me when lyricists try to be discrete/modest about it. More important than what’s told, though, is how it’s told. Someone somewhere once suggested there are two kinds of writers: writers of good sentences and writers of good paragraphs, scenes, sections, chapters, books, etc. This dichotomy, while generally false (like all such “there are two types of” proposals), seems an appropriate tachymeter for Tierney: he is sententious. Masterfully sententious. “Photons” are “mere minutes on a zip line from the sun”; a “tomato ’n’ mayo sandwich says whoa / with Wonder Bread lips”; “Questions” are “like Fedex packages no one’s willing to sign for”; “I am / vexed by one step for a [sic] man / among routine leaps for species-kind” (“[sic]” in original); “I’ve memorized to a hundred digits / the non-repeating random walk of π / in hopes that the heat off my CPU / melts the melatonin in my pineal gland.” You will never kiss your Wonder Bread in the same way again.

But consequently, while sometimes the sentences flow, most times you’re stuck. After reading a poem, solving its unknown variables, a few sentences stick out like stalactite precipitates, and that’s all you’re left with: some sweet observations you can’t wait to Tweet (or its face-to-face equivalent), or to henna onto your Facebook’s “Favourite Quotes” section. Oftentimes, it’s to the extent that you can imagine the sentences of some of these poems being reordered randomly with no loss of effect (their arrangement as probably inevitable as any other). Which is, ultimately, what quotation does (ironic, given the importance the lyric places on authorial, non-random intent).

Is it the influence of social networking, texting, and overall 24-hour news-byte-eating that makes a lot of poetry nowadays turn out this way? Or does it simply make our lyric-accustomed minds even more prone to reading it in such a fashion? Probably inevitably, it’s both. Prefacing Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis once admonished not to “set out expecting ‘good lines’” to pick out and underline, “such as [one] is accustomed to find in lyrics,” but rather to read on the much larger scale of the epic and its long, syntactical and imbricated narrative and thematic structures.[1] Lewis didn’t mean that the poem wasn’t quotable—hardly anything isn’t—but that readers accustomed to quick gratification could easily miss the forest for their favourite trees. But there seems little forest to miss when the author in question, like almost every other poet writing today, has baked up a batch of two-bit(e) lyrics.[2] In the introduction to the second panel of Carnival,[3] Steve McCaffery proposes the neoclassical heroic couplet to be an ancestor of concrete poetry. But perhaps where Carnival was prescient in its gesture toward a kind of open-source, communitarian D.I.Y. computing philosophy (as Lori Emerson judges),[4] its author was simply premature in his genealogical assessment: perhaps it’s now Twitter (and the poetry contemporary with it), that in its epigrammatic qualities qualifies as a closer formal relative of the couplet. By which I mean specifically the closed couplet (as the neoclassical couplet poems McCaffery is referring to predominantly were), in which each forms a unit more or less self-contained, both syntactically (the second line of the couplet is end-stopped) and semantically (the couplet forms a clause or sentence that could stand on its own as a pithy epigram). I’m suggesting that, despite Tierney’s liberal use of enjambment (and all the other hallmarks of contemporary unmetered, unrhyming, formally conventional verse), his poetry, and the large, cheaper-by-the-dozen family of poetry like it, is similarly closed.[5] Indeed, perhaps it’s just that the couplet reflects the nature of English sententious formations in general, but Tierney’s semantic units are not just sententious like the couplet’s, but they’re also even specifically couplet-like in their sententiousness: many of his one-liners are, lineally speaking, two-liners, and his occasional rhymes are almost always couplets or staggered couplets.

In this, Probably Inevitable only lives down to its title in yet another, even more revealing way: it’s smack-dab on the mean of the bell curve of poetry, both unpopular and popular. Popular poetry, or rather, popular lyric poetry (i.e., pop music)—distinct from populist unpopular poetry (the non-pop-music lyric—or its recent manifestation, the slam lyric)—loves sententiousness, and therefore loves the rhyming couplet. The couplet is infamously unpopular within unpopular poetry, and has been since the eighteenth century (since long before what is now unpopular poetry was unpopular), but in view of pop music, commercial slogans, and greeting cards—and now, we can add, these same (and many more) visual, textual, and aural memes as circulated via Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet at large—it has in fact been for quite some time the dominant poetic form.[6] Probably Inevitably, while much more learned than what’s to be found in a greeting card or Twitter feed, exhibits nonetheless a closely related logic in its buzzword-laden sententiousness (even to some degree, as my rom-com comparison has already hinted at, in the latter word’s connotation of “didactic or moralizing sentimentalism”), and also in its tendency towards comedy. I called them “one-liners” precisely for this extra connotation: they often pack, as sententious statements in general have a tendency of doing, a comedian’s one-two-punchline. Even punchlines themselves are made the subject of a punchline: “Third visit to / the sleep clinic plays out as punchline … I see / there’s a polygraph lying on the floor. Ba dum chhh” (ellipsis and emphasis his). It’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but the same semantic structure is at work here. To further illustrate this, as well as the sententiousness in general, consider what precedes the above unit:

My favourite T-shirt reads Same Shit, Different Pile; it says I’m a fun guy but only reflects the inner me the moment I start wearing it to bed.

As you can see, there are even two approximately two-line sententious units here that are in turn synergized into one slightly more super unit, but the structures don’t get more macro-molecular than that. The first of which even includes an allusion to precisely the kind of pop-cultural catchphrase that Probably Inevitable’s sententiousness reflects. But what is this passage’s relation to the following line about the sleep clinic (other than by association, from “bed”)? It’s not immediately evident—not to say that this in itself defines sententiousness. The point, rather, is that even in the cases where it is immediately evident, where there is an unmistakable continuity, this evidence is over-clouded by the more immediate gratifications of flashy sententiousness: that perfect Tweet.

There is continuity within these poems, and a thematic and even (as I’ve suggested) narrative wholeness for the collection itself. But this wholeness falls limp in comparison to the striking craftsmanship of its smallest individual units of meaning. Probably Inevitable, in short, is not holistic or complex: its whole is not more than the sum of its parts. It might as well be thought of as a reference book; it could’ve been organized as a Bartlett’s-style index, perhaps better suited to Twitter than to book form. Early readers are probably inevitably already re-publishing it piecemeal as such anyway. Then again, perhaps Tierney’s breaking new ground here. By now, plenty of blogs have been re-published as books, but has a Twitter feed? Let alone an unpublished Twitter feed?

Could there be a subtitle here? Probably Inevitable: 1001 fun, funny, and punny factoids & truths stated quickly—before you die of boredom. Sometimes they even verge on being sentimental social- or self-awareness viral ads: “Look at us. We play our parts, manifesting / the normative attention span of a citified adult”; “You have choices to make. So make them”; “Ages four to thirteen, / [my kids] honk like geese under a birdless sky”; “Here I am. We are.” The only thing missing is a “Like” button, or a prefatory Seinfeldian “What’s the deal with” (“ …x,” Tierney would say elliptically). And we’re supposed to, we’re assumed to—as is the case with satire (another neoclassical model)—agree that whatever Tierney says is precisely what’s the deal. But in the end, it all seems too good to be true (even if the line perhaps is true, it seems not to be because Tierney makes it too good). One then can’t help but wonder if, like Keats’s “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and like the book’s title itself (“probably inevitable” is just the same as saying “probably”), and like the committee-written pop songs and rom-com titles in which such shallow paradoxes also so often pithily reside (e.g., compare “I hate everything about you / Why do I love you,” “I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all,” and the lyrics of Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” with a Tierney phrase like “accidentally, on purpose”; as a reiteration of his title, it’s no doubt supposed to be poetically significant—just as the exact same phrase is found in songs by American Idol star David Archuleta, “indie” group The Dresden Dolls, and country star George Jones)—one can’t help but wonder if what’s here is as truly “deep” as it seems and as other reviewers are claiming; how much is deep, and how much just a big gaping hole echoing with buzzwords and media buzz?

The universe itself is such a hole, one might say—Tierney himself, perhaps, albeit in a much more polished and jargon-tinselled way—and I’d say yes, but your clever Twitterable metaphor does nothing to improve on it, and tells me nothing more about it. Most pressingly, it also doesn’t explain why Michael Robbins, the poet whose seal of approval paratextually graces Tierney’s back-cover, seems to have fallen into precisely such a literary hole. “I have no idea what that means,” he writes self-ironically, citing first Tierney and then an abstruse Tierney-esque line from Wikipedia, “but Matthew Tierney does. Let him school you.” This kind of Author-worshipful fetishizing of the Big Unknowns is nonsense. Unfortunately, it’s nonsense Tierney also prescribes to: “The secret to writing is that there is no secret,” he writes in a stereotypical writing-advice article; “There’s no breaking down the parts to figure out how the machine works.” Really? It’s magic? Is this what the Creative Writing M.(F.)A. teaches? Is this how we safeguard, preserve, and sanctify poetry’s “deepness”: refusing to understand how/that it works? Is this how the poet keeps his title? The above comments come ironically in view of what I’ve been suggesting: there’s a very dissectible “machine” here. Each sentence reads writing-workshop perfect; every word reads like it’s been tortured into submission in service of the textbook poetic image by a team of workshop critics. Each sentence is like a PR byte for Lyric Poetry. There’s always a machine, Robbins and Tierney et al. just aren’t aware of it, or refuse to be. But some of us can see the tricks. Take this almost Gertrude Stein-like non-sequitur of an if-then construction: “If motion is an illusion stitched together / by brains too rushed for a proper breakfast, / the home-security racket has recently duped our PTA.” We end up looking for words in our breakfast cereal while Tierney pulls home-security out of his hat; we’re surprised by the juxtaposition. It’s a tried-and-true, well-documented linguistic construction.

But if you refuse to explain, it’s essentially the same as saying that Jim Johnstone’s poetry is automatically “deeper” when it includes a math-formula epigraph that most poetry readers (not to mention editors) can only stare at in dumb wonder. You’re treating the Unknown as a class symbol in the same way one might the Greek epigraph to Eliot’s The Wasteland or the Latin epigraph to Pope’s “Windsor-Forest.” It’s not enough to say, as poet Ken Babstock does in a book-launch interview with Tierney, “You’ve got some fantastic titles here,” in reference to the poem “Paleosubwoofer.” One has to ask the hard questions: what’s fantastic about it? Why? Because it’s a portmanteau? (See Nick Lantz’s “Portmanterrorism.”) If one actually tries to understand Tierney’s poetry and does so, whether with the aid of Google or not; if one solves for the xs instead of concluding x = Unknown = Awesome! (thus essentially merely replacing “God” with “x” in the same way the Romantic poets replaced “God” with “Nature” and “the sublime,” and that some Digital Humanists are replacing “God” with “Digital Media”), then one will see that this book is only as deep as your Twitter status is long; only as deep as the buzzy technobabble in science-fiction movies is meant not to be meaningful but rather to signify meaningfulness. When all is said and done—when all is Googled and parsed[7]—the poems are simply more masterfully sententious lyrics (sentimental individualism propagandized) with enough basic stuff about physics, math, and philosophy mixed in competently now and then for the book to benefit from the science-in-poetry bandwagon that’s been created by a few actually innovative experiments with science and math in poetry, like those of Christian Bök, Franco Moretti, and The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. Where does Probably Inevitable really differ, then, in a culture full of Probably Inevitables? It doesn’t. It’s not an outlier: it’s Probably Inevitable.

Could that be the point, perhaps? If it is, it’s a self-defeating, ironic one with which we’re well familiar: be original by being unoriginal; poeticize commonness and the common man.  What I primarily learned from this book, besides gaining some further confirmation for the modern condition of sententiousness, is merely some things about the poet as writer of hermetically sealed Tweets or quirky ad copy. This book isn’t about math, physics, or the universe; it’s about the very inverse of those things: Tierney’s “you”-in-verse. I’m being sententious, of course. But that’s the thing: one can be sententious, can have “Seven million septillion stars. / A billion atoms in every sentence’s full stop …”, while still carrying forth and sustaining something more, something beyond the sum of its parts. The heroic couplet (I ought to emphasize) did it, the extended conceits of Donne and Shakespeare’s sonnets did it, long poems do it, and even some conceptual poetry arguably does it. Probably Inevitable does not do it.