American Prophet

With "American Prophet" Robert Fanning has created one of the most interesting characters I've ever read in poetry or fiction. His prophet is mostly quiet and ineffectual. Often, when he speaks, he's either ignored or drowned out by noise. Somehow, however, we come to love this diffident man in his black suit. We understand that he embodies both our best intentions and our failures. In several places Fanning accomplishes what Nietzsche used to brag about...how in one paragraph of his there was what others took a book to say. "The Prophet at the Superstore," is an example. For when one associates to it, it becomes a novel. "The Prophet at the Superstore" is, like so many of Fanning's poems,the story of our culture. How can anyone go to a Fred Miers or a Target or Wallmart and, after reading this poem, not know that there is a "war in his heart?" Our culture produces this maddening battle between who we are and what the corporate world pressures us to be. A striking image in this poem is that of a huge TV bank that Fanning handles thusly: "Here we stand face to face/ with the mirrored eye of the fly/ who leads us blindly into the Valley of Death... ." "The mirrored eye of the fly" ... what an image; how original. Fanning brings this poem home with, "the diminishing bodies of the shoppers/ as they sink, pulled by heavy carts." The play on heavy carts/hearts is brilliant. The imagery throughout is spectacular. In, "The Prophet and the Bride of Hope," Fanning produces a lovely internal rhyme plus a terrific image: "here a cloud of clear / despair, there an apparent prayer." And what a great idea to break the stanzas where he does. Bravo! Reading "American Prophet made me go back to Fanning's earlier book, "The Seed Thieves." I read my favorite of Fanning's poems, "Interstate 75" again. Another poem that is, really, a novel. Fanning has made a believer out of me. I'm just spreading the good news!

Often, but not always, it happens that a great idea announces itself by seeming so obvious that everyone wonders why no one had thought of it before. So with Robert Fanning's prophet in a black suit. As he wanders through the vast landscapes, mad carnivals and hectic thoroughfares of America, preparing to deliver a message to his people, the reader recognizes him as something iconic--a point of consciousness, a religious impulse, in the midst of the mindless spurting and gurgling of the masses. Just as Brian Eno, lifting cuts from a call-in radio show, created a sense of the national void with his sound composition "America is waiting for a message of some sort or other," so Fanning makes the reader walk with his prophet through everyday scenes of American life ever more conscious of their emptiness. He manages this by writing a rhythmic prose and arranging the lines in clever, but not poetically pretentious ways to bring out the odd edges and jumble of bodies, actions and things. A veritable junkpile of faces, elbows, products, structures, lightning bolts and squawks transmit the feeling of being there--at the swimming pool, at the station, in the supermarket, in traffic. The degree of movement that Fanning achieves is remarkable--a whoosh of action tumbles by before you really grasp it, yet is recognized once it is past. The feeling of immediacy is so good that you don't want to examine how it was achieved; you just want to go on and on, gliding through troubled scenes that in real life would be quite uncomfortable. I've never read a book of poetry so quickly. But here, I think, lies a problem. By making all the poems about the Prophet and his experiences, the author creates a narrative that inevitably wants events, encounters, adventures. This want is not satisfied. The Prophet continues on his way (I do not want to reveal the things that do happen), but the narrative develops no plot and only a couple of new twists. The book is supposed to be poetry, but the poetry, being more descriptive than meditative, produces different pictures of much the same thing. The narrative flow felt at the beginning is converted into variations on a theme. The solution is either more meditation or more action, and the latter is what I desired. Nevertheless, the figure of the Prophet is a stroke of genius, the scenes of Americana are deadly accurate and the pleasure in the reading is enormous. I suspect that Fanning will not be able to give up his singular character and perhaps will take him to new heights. The slim volume is nicely produced and avoids the miniscule, fly-speck print that other poetry collections seem to think is ultra-chic. This is a book to grab before it's sold out. Damn, I wish I had thought of it!