“I did not comprehend desire as a deadly force until –”

Chronic speaks to the obsessions of the imagination, the intellect, and the heart, as well as to the modern “deranging” of the landscape and the body. Eschewing the conventional prologue poem, Powell structures the book in two sections, the title poem framed in the center, followed by a coda of two linked poems. With medical valences apparent (underscored by a torso X-ray in place of a traditional author photo on the jacket flap), he names the first section “Initial C,” referencing the first letter of Chronic, and the last section “Terminal C,” the word’s last letter. Together they form a twisted set of parentheses, framing the idea of the self in the eternal present, but revealing that despite the power and immediacy of the here and now, it is simply a piece of something larger, a fragment or intrusion into a longer sentence or composition. Faced with the finite nature of life and the fickle nature of inspiration, given over to the needs and rewards of the body, where do we root our hopes for permanence? Powell considers mortality and eternity; he considers the limits of the individual and the ego alongside the limits of existence on a planet that humans are guilty of infecting:

and always, the sandbars eroding at the periphery
where freshwater meets saltwater, and sawgrass swamp
drains into estuaries and bay.       and always the balance

upset, as herbicides eradicate cat’s claw vine
which has choked out carrotwood, which has displaced cypress
and the sea absorbs the toxins and eliminated matter

what does it matter now, what is self, what is I, who gets to speak
or who does not speak, whether the poems get written
whether the reader receives them whole, in part or not at all

(from “cancer inside a little sea”)

Breathtakingly frank and dark, lyrically beautiful and passionate, Chronic attains wisdom while resisting false consolation.

Powell follows through on the conceit of his title and structure by tweaking readers’ expectations in visual and concrete ways. In “early havoc,” a poem recalling youthful inclinations to the theater, opening quotation marks signal the beginning of speech – but no closing marks follow, and the sentence redirects due to faulty memory. Known for his expansive lines, Powell pushes the physical constraints of the book by including a foldout poem appropriately titled “centerfold.” Distracted by the innovation, a reader might be tempted to dismiss the content as secondary, but in fact the poem is an eerie reminiscence occasioned by a magazine photo of an AIDS protest. Conjuring the promiscuity of youth with vivid imagery, including “on the steps of city hall at the yearly die-in: he was a body . . . you heaved upon like amphibious d-day craft quitting the ocean,” Powell infuses his lines with genuine, understated regret. The flip side, “cinemascope,” contains brackets and cross-outs. Turning to the committed and somewhat stifling domesticity of age, the poem ends with an echo of the biography of Sylvia Plath. It is a powerful statement on the guilt of surviving: “nearly everyone else, pissed off passed away / past and past and past.” Far beyond gimmickry and cheekiness, these subversions of convention support the underlying curse/hope of this book: What if the unexpected happens? What if the world surprises our imaginations?

In part, this has already happened, as indicated by the beautiful love poem “continental divide.” At the middle of life, with youthful indiscretions a distant memory overlaid by years of loneliness, the poet offers a moving, measured praise of love. Several poems explore love as a resolution to the book’s thematic questions of temporality and eternity. In signaling a relationship in trouble with the opening poem, “no picnic,” Powell sounds the themes of artistic manipulation and the fallibility of memory. In “gospel on the dial, with intermittent static,” the lovers shelter from the rain in a cavity caused by lightning in a sequoia’s trunk, mirroring in miniature the emblem of the book’s title and structure: if it is temporary, there is still peace. In “coit tower & us,” Powell seems to say our memory of comfort is permanent, even if the experience of it is not. The demands of illness and the body, the essentially solipsistic nature of pain, may be what drive a relationship to its end, “that night in the foxhole with the pfc” suggests, a theme repeated in a later poem, “scenes from the trip we didn’t take to the antarctic”:

say it with me, sunshine: today, brainscan; today, x-ray
today, complete metabolic panel with platelet differential
today, urinalysis; today, liver biopsy; today, preparing the body

at the last station, the sepulcher was empty and you asked why
beyond this numbing terrain, frozen white cell: phantom laughter
didn’t you hear it all along?     or did you think it was just the wind

But “even the business of dying must be set aside occasionally,” Powell says in “meditating upon the meaning of the line ‘clams on the halfshell and rollerskates’ in the song good times by chic,” reasserting memory’s dominance over pain in some stern self-talk: “go away, you bitter cuss.     it’s still 1980 somewhere, some corner of your dark apartment / where the mystery of the lyric hasn’t faded.     and love is in the chorus waiting to be born.”

Although now it may seem commonplace for poets to incorporate popular references from commercial culture into serious work, Powell helped to pioneer this approach, and remains its best practitioner. In “confessions of a teenage drama queen,” he seems to refute his critics who have called him confessional in a hilarious string of B-movie titles and clichés. With endless source material, the challenge of writing such a poem is to be selective, and Powell has the best ear in the business:

I was a male war bride.     I was a spy
so I married an axe murderer.     I married joan
I married a monster from outer space

I am guilty, I am the cheese, I am a fugitive from a chain gang
maybe I’ll come home in the spring.     I’ll cry tomorrow.
whose life is it anyway?     it’s a wonderful life.

[...]

I was a burlesque queen, I was a teenage zombie
I was an aventuress, I was a convict, I was a criminal
I did it, I killed that man, murder is my beat, I confess

The poem also serves as a warning, forbidding too much autobiographical interpretation of the work. In a poem published in a recent issue of Poetry, Powell offers lines that may shed light on his creative process, in the persona of a student addressing a master:

I have never written a true poem, it seems. Snatches
of my salacious dreams, sandwiched together all afternoon
at my desk, awaiting the dark visitation of The Word.

In contrast to the experimental poems included in Chronic are poems written in traditional form, such as terza rima for “come live with me and be my love,” and a hybrid of the English and Italian sonnet with “coal of this unquickened world.” In fact, classical mythology informs the structure of Chronic, providing rich counterpoint to the poet’s innovation. If a thread running through this book is the relationship of an older and younger man, it draws meaning from the tale of Corydon and Alexis. Powell further bookends the work by beginning with an epigraph from Virgil, and ending with a coda of two poems titled after these figures.

In Virgil’s story, the unrequited desire Corydon feels for Alexis transports him from the literal world to a fantasy realm of the imagination, where he engages in a dialogue of his own making. Finding that he loves the figment of Alexis more than the real person, and struggling to fit his emotions into his pastoral setting, Corydon awakes from his dream and upbraids himself. Doubting that the music he has created is appreciated, he attempts to express his desire in sanctioned ways by using an image of Pan’s pipes as a metaphor for coupling. Powell playfully echoes this image in the racy poem, “lipsync [with a nod to lipps, inc.]”

However, all Corydon’s attempts to find other paradigms that will fit his desire into his surroundings achieve only ambiguous results, with the implication that the effort continues beyond the story. This myth is a powerful engine that fuels Powell’s thematic explorations of temporality, mortality, and eternity; desire, art, and impermanence; and artistic ego, self-doubt, and the creative process. In the book’s final line, he encapsulates the abiding questions that result: “as if banishing love is a fix.    as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes.”

If the pastoral world order did not allow Corydon’s desire to find justification, in Powell’s book the adversary is the suburbanization of the California landscape. In “republic,” he comments that the processed land of industry and agriculture removed some of the causes of catastrophic illnesses such as malaria and typhoid, and yet clearly the chronic illnesses we have inherited in their place are a result. Placing the relatively feeble yet enduring activity of creating art in stark contrast to the poisoning of our world and our bodies, Powell steers clear of conventional consolation:

you want me to tell you the marvels of invention? that we persevere
that the time of flourishing is at hand? I should like to think it

meanwhile, where have I put the notebook on which I was scribbling

it began like:

            “the smell of droppings and that narrow country road . . .”

Powell has said that the photo on the cover of Chronic shows river waste from a paper mill. At first glance it appears cellular, as if we are seeing a sample under a microscope. Upon closer inspection, we see the indicators of scale and human habitation, including a tiny building and power line in a lower corner. This seems a fitting emblem for the crux of human issues so masterfully covered in this book, the easy transport from macro to micro and back that Powell achieves.

*

Out here in the fields I find myself surrounded by Syracuse slush if by “fields” we understand that I mean both exterior & interior plains & if by “slush” we agree that I mean both the quickly melting snow & the icy drifts of blankness clouding my head.

I find myself surrounded by what I am surrounded by but know, too, that there’s a transcendental reality to all this.  I hope, however, that my hopes for a fully realized life can be real & here & right now (more than ever) & can exist between breathing people & not just shimmery glowing essence.

Lots of people with brains have written about The Who’s record Who’s Next (1971) – & they’ve done a good job of articulating the fantastical, utopian vision that Pete Townshend had in mind for Lifehouse, the concept performance/religion out of which wreckage Who’s Next was forged.

Though I have a brain, I mostly listen to The Who using equal parts ear (I have two of those) & heart (just one, but it’s big) & maybe soul (I imagine I have one of those).  So though I am incredibly drawn to the story of a mad rock god who tried to facilitate a moment in which the music played could reflect every personality in attendance on a given night, that he could play hard enough & better enough (& ENOUGH enough!) to blend those people together, to shake them from their separate lives & accelerate them all together to some revelated state of being, I’m also living in a world in which I know the great experiment failed…at least on the terms Townshend laid down at the time.

The rains are coming in as I type this & my head is buzzing with the word “compathy” because I typed it in a letter to a friend.  I’m thinking about how I communicate.  Though sometimes pegged as melodramatic – over the top – to me, Who’s Next will always be an earnest, rip-your-face-off statement of Romantic Sentiment, music that embodies the soul & makes luminous the body, an undeniable pull to live life more fully than you think possible & to be happy to fail more grandly than ever in the attempt.

Track 1: Baba O’Riley

“The happy ones are near.  Let’s get together before we get much older.”

Sally, take my hand.  This is an introduction to the record’s method, the complex weaving of the far ends of The Who’s range – melodic, musical, composed & beautiful, paired with a barely contained rage, a ragged & driving guitar that picks its way across desolate fields.

Townshend can barely croon “Don’t cry, don’t raise your eye” before he’s overpowered both by Moon’s explosive & unpredictable percussives & his own voice going rough.  Implicitly, this modulation of tones, this deployment of emotion, gets us closer to the bone of the authentic utterance.  It puts your back into your living.

Track 2: Bargain

“I’d gladly lose me to find you.”

Again, a melodic lure before the Moon landing assault begins.

To find you, I’m gonna drown an unsung man.  That’s a bargain?  Yes.  Punctuated again with light bursts of Daltrey’s signature lilting vocals, the context here is much more frantic, desperate.  The underlying theme is “whatever it takes.”  The drive is to drive – to keep pushing.  To give everything your all.  Thankful for the tragedy; gratitude for the anguish.  Our salvation is that we can, if we’re lucky, be with someone else.  Sally, take my hand.

Track 3: Love Ain’t For Keeping

“The air is perfumed by the burning firewood.  The seeds are bursting.  The spring is seeping.”

A bucolic moment.  A romantic, & Romantic, breath.  The song starts recollected in tranquility & stays there, despite the resignation of the repeated sentiment: Love ain’t for keeping.  But such tenderness in the acceptance of this – such buoyant affirmation in recognizing your place in a world where even the bad is good (black ash from the foundry perfumes the air) & where we can, yes, be everlasting today.  There’s a subtle shift here as the push for connection foregrounded earlier may have a crack – that maybe searching is the best we can hope for (see also, “The Seeker,” Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy, also 1971).  Finding never lasts.

Track 4:  My Wife

“Gonna lay down on the floor; I gotta rest some time so I can get to run some more.”

Panic switch; relay point; terror.  To me this song moves more than the others; perhaps this is the jump cut exterior action the listener responds to after the mostly lyrical moments presented in the previous tracks.  Again & again, after listing consequences, Entwistle (who wrote the lyrics as well) takes solace from the fact that “I’ll still be alive.”

A life of being on the run, of resting only so as to be able to run some more, gets drilled into our heads while brass drones & a piano bangs around.  This is the fallout of the failure.  But, tellingly, it’s never the end.

Track 5:  The Song Is Over

“I’ll sing my heart out to the infinite sea.”

Maybe the biggest Romantic proclamation on the whole record & it’s both BIG & ROMANTIC.  This epic lost love song repeatedly reinforces the need to simultaneously embrace the past & the future.  Our love is over; it’s all behind me; they’re all ahead now.  While the speaker asserts the confusion inherent in his project (Thought it was me I was looking for), the outstretched heart pleads to be sung out – to be given voice.  As if that’s enough.

It is – if coupled with the bust-your-ass aesthetic implied in a lyric like “I must remember even if it takes a million years.”  Childish, maybe.  But honest & full of feeling.  Sally once took my hand & then let go.

Track 6:  Getting in Tune

“There’s a symphony that I hear in your heart sets my head a-reeling.”

The song starts as a statement on the process of art-making – ie, singing this note only because it fits in with the chords he happens to be playing.  Whatever one has to say will come out with the proper occasion & the proper occasion may be no occasion at all.  But along with the interior pledge to sing a song & sing it well, comes the drive to connect with an other.  When I look in your eyes and see the harmonies, the heartaches soften.  Never mind the concision of the image spheres & word choice.

There is something lovely in the way Daltrey’s voice alternates between clean & clear sentiment & ragged yowls that seem to try to either 1) cover it up or 2) be overwhelmed by it.  Such complexity of registers makes this a model.  We’ve become more committed than ever to the failed math equation proposed earlier (“One & one don’t make two; one & one make one,” “Bargain”).

Track 7: Going Mobile

“I’m gonna find a home & we’ll see how it feels.”

Daltrey has Townshend take over to lighten the vocalization even more, airing it out a little, while Pete adds some electrifying squeals to the principal project– one of being out on the run, experiencing, not stopping.

The speaker says all this momentous momentum is his “solution” to the problem that has been posed in song after song on this record.  How do we live?

How do we live in a world that has other people in it when, ultimately, we have to live without other people?

Track 8:  Behind Blue Eyes

“No one knows what it’s like to feel these feelings like I do.”

An opening croon disables your defenses for the anger barely concealed underneath this ode to separate living.  There’s a fallacy in the very first line – obviously we all know what it’s like to feel – that gets clarified after the emotional floodgates are opened.  Logistically, we feel isolated & alone in our emotions until we learn to actually express our anguish & hope (my love is vengeance that’s never free).  Then, we come to the truth of the matter – that no other person knows what it’s like to feel these feelings like I do.  Rewind to “compathy,” a term that means essentially sharing your feelings with other people (maybe a little more possible, in this Next world, than empathy which takes as its fundamental principal that you can feel the feelings of others).

Once unleashed, the speaker has no choice but to enumerate all the instances in which an other might be able to help mediate an experience of the world.  But this just seems like so much fist-shaking.  The hope has long since been given up on.

Track 9:  Won’t Get Fooled Again

“Smile & grin at the change all around.  Pick up my guitar & play.  Just like yesterday.”

What’s left?  Now that the world has been revealed as a kind of disappointment in & of itself, that the only thing left for all of us is to keep on keeping on, just like yesterday, we shout out loud that we won’t get fooled again.  We know better!  Though certainly that’s a lie – that the Romantic spirit carries us ever & always hopeful in search of that connection, that transcendence.

If the world is a failure & human interconnection doesn’t work, what choice do we have but to keep trying?  We pray we won’t get fooled again while being pretty sure we will & are glad of it.

Why else end the record with a scream?

~~~

How To Say Goodbye Early Morning

When the words don’t add up, skyrocket
the marigold picture you’ve kept in your heart.
If accumulation isn’t

a poem it might just be some drift.  I’m just
snow; I’m typing miles of slush.

I’m just but I’m being tried & the discussion
splinters the shut door.  Today
is decommission day, a frantic blocked

transmission hitting its beak against the glass
lonely for the living room.  I’m done with

hummingbird.  I’m ready to stay put or drop
broken to the ground after one frantic rush
too many.  But the sky was clear!  Some invisible

brick, some crack on the wing.  I’m done
with trudge though I’m marshaling

my forces.  I’m putting on my boots.  I’m
a parade dress, obvious lockstep as I blanket
the bed & check my watch.  We’re going

through maneuvers.  I can’t remember
if I mentioned the sun.  I’m afraid to look back

& check.  I’m afraid to stop.  The workings
a mystery, the feelings of hunger & heat.
People, here are the results.  Here’s the arc

stuck far up my sleeve, ready to throw down
at the right time.  Here’s the trajectory for today.

Today, I’m left or leaving. Would I have stayed
a few more minutes if someone had tricked me
into thinking those minutes repair & build?

Nate Pritts is the author of three full-length books of poems – The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon Books, 2010), Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press, 2008) & Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX, 2007).  His poetry & prose have been published widely, both online & in print, in journals such as The Southern Review, Jacket, Gulf Coast, DIAGRAM, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Octopus, & Forklift, Ohio among many others.  He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N.  Find him online at http://www.natepritts.com.

Questions, compliments, (hopefully not) complaints? Contact Jackie Clark: afterthoughtgraveyard [at] gmail [dot] com.  Check out previous POP essays here: http://pop.coldfrontmag.com/

“Good for us who walk among the ghosts.”

Today isn’t Wednesday.  It’s Sunday.  And it isn’t sunny.  It’s actually really cold and rainy out—a perfect day to stay inside and scribble out a few words on Noelle Kocot’s Sunny Wednesday, a book I’ve been carrying around with me since I got it last Spring.  Between then and now, I’ve read it many times.  It was one of only two books I took with me to Europe this past summer (the other being Renato Poggioli’s Theory of the Avant-Garde—another story entirely), and it’s been with me this Fall wherever I’ve gone—Houston, Louisville, New York.  A couple of times, I’ve thought to take it out of my bag and replace it with a different book, but something (not the thought of writing these remarks) has always stopped me.  What something?  I don’t know.  I’m not really sure I care.  Can I say the book is haunting, perplexing, electric?  I can.  I do.  Do I have some big thesis to make here?  I do not.  Or maybe.  Yes.

Sunny Wednesday is a book in the middle of something, halfway between the end of time (the end of a certain time—with double emphasis on “certain”) and the next thing, as yet in the shadows.  I think about this next thing (these next things) a lot (both in relation to the book and life), the past and the future as seen from that momentary and ever-shifty, yet perpetual middle ground of the present—that Wednesday between Sunday and Saturday, the midway between absolutes—the birth salute and the death salute.  And it’s sunny, too, this Wednesday, this green-y middle meadow, but don’t let that fool you.  Rather, think about it as ambiguously as possible, i.e. that “sunny” doesn’t necessarily mean things are (figuratively speaking) looking up—only that someone is (literally) looking up into the sky and noticing there a brightness, perhaps in marked contrast to the way the looker actually feels:

The study of heat blinks
In the midday sun.
Soon, a blaze of rhyme
Will cast an artificial glare
And sunset on the windowsill.
Good for us who die in flames.
Good for us who walk among the ghosts.

(“Nature Poem”)

And yet, with so much goodness at hand, the feeling remains complicated.  The world remains a haunted place: half-sensations, and echoes and traces.

So now, with all that in mind…

***

At the center of this collection of 59 poems is a massive absence, the loss of a beloved—a spouse—producing a gargantuan swell (or perhaps shock after shock) of mourning, longing and ekstasis.  To read these poems is to experience a terrible, though often beautifully wrecked and crushing, embodiedout of body strangeness, “I saw my love shoot up the intravenous moonlight, / Vanished in a Milky Way of negatives” Kocot writes at the beginning of “Neptune,” an image which is simultaneously fucked-up and lush, galactic and romantic, flooded with light and sucked into darkness. In fact, and perhaps paradoxically, dispersion, fade-out and negation (both formally and subject-wise) are the prime movers of these poems, for example in these lines from “Rite”: “I forget and walk off into the dying world without you / And the memory of your laughter that keeps clawing at the void.”  What’s weird about so much of this book is how the poems seem in a constant state of vanishing, and yet they never blink out entirely.  Their radiation imprints a spirit on the air itself:

I predict the end of my predictions
And the loss of the whole world
At your brilliant shadow
And I will continue to hum
Your buried music like a refrigerator
Deep into the night

( from “Tribute #2”)

What I love about these poems is that they’re brimming with personal metaphorical gestures, which, at their best, don’t come off as secret-code making—and even when they do I usually could care less, because the images themselves are so arresting, stirring, and/or devastating:

Too often, you are only a shadow cast

Across an endless sunny Wednesday:

Trapezoidal sleep, spell-check aflame with saints,

Roseate silo, the arrows are dark, the moment sharp.

(from ‘“You Will Always Be My Animal”’)

That said, I’m also intrigued by the fact that reading these poems I’m not able to set aside—the way as a “good” reader I’m supposed to be able to set aside—what I know and have read about Noelle Kocot, the person—that she was married to Damon Tomblin, a composer who died as the result of a heroin overdose—a loss which has had an understandably profound effect on Kocot and her work.  References to “Damon” and “shooting up” abound in this collection, along with constant reminders of a deep separation of souls.  It seems that autobiography is the scaffolding upon which Sunny Wednesday’s poems (not to mention those in Kocot’s previous book Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems) hang both their grief and amazement at the fact that anything exists at all.  And while it’s the personal that provides the poems’ stability, it’s the universality of the larger human issues here that give the work its visceral power.  These poems aren’t what one might typically think of as confessional lyrics.  For one thing, they don’t confess or divulge the personal beyond the scaffolding I’ve already mentioned. Rather, they take note in the midst of the scaffolding—as if, weirdly, to build it up imaginatively, so as to be both wholly inspired/mired in it and also transcend it entirely, often floating or collapsing—resolutely unresolved:

Now, as I wait, miles ahead of and miles behind

My time, a train that hovers here suspended

Over a warm pool of numbers, never adding up

Or subtracting delicately away.

(from “This Is What You Get”)

And whereas, the more I think about, for example, Robert Lowell’s poems, the more I’m drawn to think about Robert Lowell, in contrast, the more I think about Noelle Kocot’s poems the further away from her I get.  Rather than being therapeutic explorations of the facts, Kocot’s poems explore the possibilities—emotional, imaginative, and intellectual—of what the facts point to—something beyond, “I forget and walk off into the dying world without you/And the memory of your laughter that keeps clawing at the void.”  In other words, these poems are, more than anything else, physically moving responses to the swirl of existence and its constant barrage of beginnings (surprise) and endings (loss).  As such, the poems in Sunny Wednesday are an assertion of BEING in the face of our having to live with and against its antithesis, GRAVITY/NOT-BEING.

Furthermore, whereas many poets use poetry as one of the ways to organize, make sense of, and explode the presences and experience of the overwhelming fullness of life, Kocot seems to be using it to make sense of this fullness in the face of the Void, an unshakeable and overwhelming emptiness/absence, one brimming simultaneously with meaning and meaninglessness, breath and breathlessness, ritual and randomness, aloneness and loneliness, music and silence, darkness and light.  Nowhere in the book is this more mind-blowingly and beautifully demonstrated than in “Once Upon a Time in America” where Kocot begins the poem addressing her deceased husband:

Here in this room I slept
As you lay dead and alone
After you died, while I, superstitious
Peasant slept, slept through
Phone call after phone call from
Detective after detective, finally
Waking to Daniel’s simple and beatific
Damon’s dead […]

From here, however, the poet, after making arrangements “like a cop/Or fireman” and saying “I love you to the morning sky” flies into the imaginative ether:

Never having been one of the fully
Living, I live, half of me in
a cornfield filled with skyscrapers,
Half of me in that place we are
Before we’re born and after we die.
Tonight, I was outside thinking
Of that holy drunken terror
Jackson Pollock. Fuck you moon,
He’d shout and cry. A big dog
Came running up to me and his owner
Shouted, Jackson, come back here.

It’s as if Kocot’s associations and imagination become REAL LIFE—from saying “I love you to the morning sky” to Pollock’s “Fuck you moon” to the rather mysterious/mystical appearance of Jackson, the dog—as if Kocot’s own associations have come instantly TO BE.  The poem ends with the poet once again addressing her husband:

You are a dead musician who died
Alone.  I wait to go to you,
Smoking and breaking curses under
The Jackson Pollock fuck you moon.

What’s so blindingly weird to me here is that the poem leaves off with everything blundered-up-the-same: the musician has died alone, the speaker waits alone, and Jackson Pollock’s “Fuck you moon” has been transformed/transferred to the moon itself, which presides over everything in anger, defiance and recognition/resignation.  It’s as if all the stuff of life is just one shifting mess of strangeness and witchcraft.

And yet, the book is not without its own antidote, as words themselves not only describe and articulate, but make, meaning—which is always a kind of connectedness, one thing to another to an other.  Or as Kocot puts it in “To You, the Only”
 

And when I am lost
Your scent wafts toward me
Like the notes of a vibraphone
And I shake off the muck of existence

[…]

To remind you that before all else we are animals full of music
Tethered to the contradictions of this world.

*

Apocalyptic Swing, Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Dearest Creature, Amy Gerstler
What the Right Hand Knows, Tom Healy
Practical Water, Brenda Hillman
Open Interval, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Should be frosty.

Featured poets will be: Brianna Colburn, Jordan Davis, DJ Dolack, Shafer Hall, and Justin Marks

The reading will be followed by a DANCE PARTY. DJs Tobychoo & J. Cannibal will spin funk, garage, freak 40 and 60s soul. Get down so you can get down. Or at least have a few…

As Richard Chamberlain once said: “Realistically, it doesn’t hurt to be good-looking, especially in this business.”

by Michael Rymer

I almost couldn’t finish writing this. Not because I was blocked or anything, but because I kept getting interrupted by a guy called P.

The first time I saw him was on a Sunday. I wasn’t writing. I was sleeping when he climbed through my bedroom window. Then he started marching around the bed, beating his chest and shouting, “Enjoy the sleep while you can! Enjoy the sleep while you can!” He woke my wife, too, of course. It was only 9 a.m. She is – or we are – pregnant. (She is [we are!] due in April.) So we both understood what he meant.

I should have mentioned this before: P. is not a normal-sized man. At just 20 inches tall, he’s a miniature version of a man. But he’s a miniature version of a very intimidating man – big chest, flannel shirts, blond stubble. If I saw him in a hard hat, I wouldn’t blink.

And he has sticky hands. One night in January, he followed me to a downtown Barnes and Noble and scaled the New Fiction shelf at the front of the store and crouched atop it for ten minutes until I walked over (oblivious to him). I picked up a copy of Maile Meloy’s new collection of short stories. As soon as I opened the book to the first story, he leapt, and landed with a foot on each opened page. Then he handed me a tiny Bic pen.

At first, I was reluctant to talk about P., but when I started to do so, I learned that he visits a lot of men in my situation. A few guys confirmed what I had already suspected – that P. – or Mr. P., as everyone seems to call him – is my conscience; or, rather, a sort of universal conscience for men with pregnant wives. (“P.” is for pregnant.) Some guys – ones who’d already had kids and hadn’t seen him for years, usually – even seemed to like him. “All he really wants to do is prepare you,” one said. But they also acknowledged that he can be really aggressive.

That night at Barnes and Noble, he started shouting: “I want you to make a list! One: a Dutailier Matrix Glider. Two: an Ergo organic baby tote. Three: a Diaper Genie.” On and on he went, listing ten or eleven products – baby products – he said I should have been thinking about buying – should have been saving for – before I looked for “another novel.” (Any book that’s not a how-to book about parenting is, to him, a novel.)

Two weeks ago, I was home alone, enjoying the last hours of a long academic vacation, re-reading Frank Conroy’s Stop Time, the writer’s classic memoir of his teen years, when I felt a rumble under one of the cushions. It was him. He pried Stop Time out of my hands and tossed it into the kitchen. Then he dangled a purple paperback called The Infant Sleep Solution in front of me. I had to lock him in the bathroom. I had a deadline. I told him I’d call the police.

Now I understand he was just trying to save me – to save me from Jean, Conroy’s stepfather,  the “ne’er do well son of a collapsed aristocratic New Orleans family” at the center of Stop Time. Jean is a loafer who people seem to tolerate as long as they do only because of his con man good looks, which Conroy describes:

He was six feet tall, slim, and sported a black mustache. The bones of his face and head were extraordinarily delicate and well proportioned, just slightly smaller than life size, accentuating their fineness. A perfect Greek head, but without the Greek effeminacy. His features were French and masculine. Dark, almost black eyes, a thin humorous mouth.

Jean is still a young man when he marries Dagmar, Conroy’s mother. Dagmar is his third wife.

Just two things, aside from women, capture Jean’s imagination: conspiracy theories – he believes that “dentists refused to tell people not to eat sugar because in doing so they would put themselves out of business” and that “there was no such thing as heredity, everything started from zero when the sperm cell met the egg cell” – and the prospect of earning rental income. At eleven, Conroy is a captive (though already skeptical) audience when Jean talks about auto industry cabals or the dangers of white bread, and he and his sister and mother are at the mercy of Jean’s entrepreneurial whimsies: the family goes from New York to Florida, from Florida to New York, and then back to Florida, and back to New York, as Jean sniffs out ways of making money. It’s the life of an army brat, without the international stays.

And Jean is no colonel.

He is a real estate prospector! Their first trip to Florida – to Chula Vista, a housing development near Fort Lauderdale that was abandoned during the Depression and then resettled by a Wisconsin Socialist known as Doc – Jean and family build a house without any outside help and without the aid of an architectural plan. The completed structure looks like “one large room.”

He is a green grocer! Back in New York, Jean sets up a produce stand at the corner of 68th and Lexington, but quits just a few days in, conceding that fruit vendors in New York don’t in fact have “one of the sweetest deals around.” Next, he works as a night warden at the Southbury Training School, a Connecticut State Institution for the “feeble-minded.” A weekend post that requires little of him other than sitting in the kitchen, it’s as close as he can get to money for nothing without stealing.

This he does also, bilking money from checks sent from the estate of Conroy’s late father. (He is a thief!) He needs the money for when he moves the family back to Chula Vista to build a second house, this time with lumber scavenged from an abandoned barracks. Neither house is ever tenanted (or not that Conroy mentions, at least).

Scary, that Jean, eh?

Well, he is for me. He reminds me of visions I’ve had (in nightmares and in moments of professional panic) of myself in five or ten years. In these visions, I’m a comically misguided writer who makes quixotic professional decisions that seem designed to forestall, rather than generate, income: Here I am sinking four years into researching an un-contracted book on the history of jaywalking, or Vaseline! Here I am paying thousands of dollars to a web designer to create a blog covering the nut butter industry! And here I am as a literary species of deadbeat father, a man who, though his baby is in need of a new diaper, won’t put down his New Yorker.

That’s why I’ve sometimes wondered if I should have allowed Mr. P. to take Stop Time with him and pulp it, or whatever he was going to do. Well, of course I wouldn’t have wanted that. But I’m highly susceptible to influence – even to the influence of literary characters – and Jean is not a good influence for me.

In the last pages of Stop Time, Conroy writes of Jean’s unexpected transformation into a responsible father, working long hours as a taxi driver to support a baby daughter born to him and Dagmar. But with Conroy himself, Jean never really tried. The boy is just marital baggage, mildly threatening because of his precocious intelligence and moderately useful as an extra pair of hands to remove shingles, pump water, bag produce, or fetch milk. He’s not someone to love, boast about or laugh with or instruct. He’s someone for whom fatherhood– the idea of it and the day-to-day transactions it entails – never kindles any avidity. So I won’t be upset if he makes a swift exit from my memory before April.

And yet.

And yet I can’t help but wonder if Jean was doing something right, if there was some twisted wisdom in his abnegation of parental responsibility. I’m serious, though I’m sure this cracked thought wouldn’t have occurred to me if I hadn’t read Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park around the same time. If you include her biological parents, the wealthy uncle and aunt who adopt her, and another aunt who poses as her custodian, that novel’s heroine, Fanny, has five parents, none of whom take much interest in her life, and she blossoms in a solitude enforced by this neglect. In stark contrast with the over-indulged, histrionic cousins alongside whom she’s raised, Fanny is contemplative, staunch, serene.

She’s as successful at raising herself, as it were, as Conroy, who masters the yo-yo in Florida (he learns a trick called The Universe and executes fifty consecutive Loop-the-Loops) and reads novels during his days at as a student at Stuyvesant high school (he provides a seven line-long list of writers he read which includes Lawrence, Mailer, Zola, Dumas, Dreiser; he just avoided flunking out) and pursues one interest after another without anyone ever noticing. Later, he teaches himself to play the piano (and he would make his living as a jazz pianist for many years).

Both Fanny and Conroy seem to thrive on building their lives from scratch, and it’s hard to imagine how either of them would have developed under a more watchful parental gaze. Would Fanny, like her cousins, have fallen for buffoonish men? Could Conroy have possibly written this book, which deserves its reputation as a great memoir. (Trust me, read it, and then forgive me for not celebrating it enough. Its great virtue, aside from Conroy’s language, is its author’s utter lack of rancor.) Or one like it?

(You have to go beyond this book, which Conroy wrote in his 30’s, to appreciate the man’s life, which I know only through his often anthologized essay, “Think About It,” which describes his friendship with Justice William O. Douglas; an account of a former student of his at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which he directed for 18 years, who described him as one of the “last great mentors,” and an interview he gave, wearing a floppy brown cardigan over a baby blue button-down shirt, for the 2002 documentary, The Stone Reader, in which he explains that, when you read a book you love “you feel that you are the brother of the author and the two of you are working together,” and he recalls trying to write at night after returning from piano gigs, with sweat dripping down his face. (Conroy died in 2005)).

As I write this, Mr. P. has joined me. He used a fingernail clipper to cut through the screen of my office window as I was absorbed in writing and he’s now climbing the leg of my desk. He must have sensed that I’ve been tumbling toward a preposterous question:

And what is the value of careful, attentive parenting anyway?

Now Mr. P is jumping on my keyboard. He’s shouting:

Aren’t there nine, or nineteen, or ninety-nine other Frank Conroy’s out there who did flunk out of Stuyvesant and never went on to Haverford College (as Conroy did) and are slaving away like Jean finally had to, driving a cab?

Of course there are. I’m sorry. I’m new at this.

*

Michael Rymer writes Odd Couples, a periodic Coldfront column that closely addresses two ostensibly different works of literature. He holds a B.A. in Comparitive Literature from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Nonficition Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, GOOD, and elsewhere. A a graduate of the Writers’ Institute at theCUNY Graduate Center, he lives in the Bronx. Find more at michaelrymer.com.

*

Three Percent

Nicole Brossard, Selections.
Translated from the French by Guy Bennett, David
Dea, Barbara Godard, Pierre Joris, Robert Majzels,
Erin Moure, Jennifer Moxley, Lucille Nelson, Larry
Shouldice, Fred Wah, Lisa Weil, Anne-Marie Wheeler.
(Canada, University of California)

René Char, The Brittle Age and Returning Upland.
Translated from the French by Gustaf Sobin.
(France, Counterpath)

Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another.
Translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah.
(Palestine, FSG)

Elena Fanailova, The Russian Version.
Translated from the Russian by
Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler.
(Russia, Ugly Duckling Presse)

Hiromi Ito, Killing Kanoko.
Translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles.
(Japan, Action Books)

Marcelijus Martinaitis, KB: The Suspect.
Translated from the Lithuanian by Laima Vince.
(Lithuania, White Pine)

Heeduk Ra, Scale and Stairs.
Translated from the Korean by
Woo-Chung Kim and Christopher Merrill.
(Korea, White Pine)

Novica Tadic, Dark Things.
Translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic.
(Serbia, BOA Editions)

Liliana Ursu, Lightwall.
Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter.
(Romania, Zephyr Press)

Wei Ying-wu, In Such Hard Times.
Translated from the Chinese by Red Pine.
(China, Copper Canyon)

*

“Lure the son of a bitch with an open lane.”

Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems by Canadian poet Randall Maggs is nearly 200 pages long. Whenever a volume of poetry defies the 40-80 page fiefdom, it is worth taking note. This one is about Terry Sawchuk, NHL’s greatest goalie. Maggs has an easy way with meter, and his interest in Irish poetry suggests he has given considerable thought to conceiving of lines of plain-spoken eloquence. Lines move in and out of meter with little interest in overall form or structure. This can be both a blessing and a curse. Here, the narrative drives the poems rather than the language itself. That is not to say that the lines are slack, but that they lack tension and torque. A typical passage reads:

He falls down twice on his way to the net. I sense
the crowd lean forward, ready to leap. What’s that about?
Is this what it all comes down to after Detroit, a little goalie show
for the fans? Waiting at center ice to take their shots, his team-mates
circle nervously, flipping snow at friends in the stands.
What wouldn’t they give to put one past me,
here in front of the home crowd.

The narrative will be familiar to anyone with passing knowledge of the trajectory of our sports greats: childhood-marring family death (“and smiling, cocked / his head to make a final point (they said), / half rose, and then pitched forward on his face.”); constant touring (“Traveling east, the stubble fields gave way / to endless trees. Bored, I’d shouldered past the blast / between the cars”); glories of victory (“The gods lean out / below the smoky beams and cheer the circling / goalie hoisted high.”); greedy owners (“While Jack across the river/ signed a check and closed his door.”); constant physical pain (“Darkest night of his life, once the morphine / seeped away. He wept and prayed.”); all topped off with a generous helping of nostalgia (“’That one’s him in Detroit in ’52. What he did in the playoffs that year will never be done again.”).

The book does a lot of things right, using the poems the way a traditional biography might use chapters, giving us an anecdote, a reflection, a new prism in which we can uncover Sawchuk the man. It is well-researched, with a bibliography a journalist or academic would envy. The book seems to be written with a wider audience in mind than the average poetry book. There are even pictures, including a rather ghastly one of Sawchuk’s face that is somewhat well-known.

A few multi-page prose poems throughout the book are so successful, they inadvertently demonstrate the limits of the competent quasi-iambic narrative in the rest of the book. Simply put, the book is way too long, and the material is not enlivened by the use of verse. I struggled with the pervasive sense that my enjoyment of the book depended on me knowing each wing forward blasting shots at Sawchuk’s un-masked face. And yet, one knows where the book is headed with its combination of braggadocio and sentimentality. Individual lines, and even poems, do not stand out. The integrity of the work is in the book, not the lines, not the poems. In that sense, it is more like prose. While Night Work gleefully exceeds the regular poetry book length, the 200 pages of poetry do not exceed the emotional and thematic dynamic of the regular sports biography, whether found in prose or on ESPN Classic, begging the question, why not just write a prose bio? It is one medium clamoring after the virtues of another.

There are some exceptions. For example, the droll, Frederick Seidel-like mashup of plain-talk and metrical and rhythmical ingenuity:

And doubled up all night, my Christ,
what a life. Like Pompeii’s dead, my arse in the air,
bare. I don’t care.

A more sustained success can be found in the poem “Colour in this Country” which describes Sawchuk’s team watching its opponents (possibly amateur, as was typical of the era) coming out of the bar,

Talking together and joking, they passed
in front of our bus like young men at the front, their days
reduced to frivolity and disaster.

The poignant banality of this bunch, along with Sawchuk’s wearied and dispirited voice, joins into a meditation on the landscape they are living and playing in:

You sensed a sparing use
of colour in this country. You’d get a splotch of it here and there,
a memorable blouse in a lounge, a clock promoting rum,
the local team in its colours taking the ice.

The poem ends with a further removal, the just-described scene revealed as a memory:

My own mood was darkening.
Everything seemed to be splitting away.
In the photograph, all you could really see were shapes
curving darkly into a white that might have been
the page’s nothingness.

A shorter book of more of these moments would have greatly enhanced the work overall. That said, Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems gets an extra star if you read the Wikipedia entry on Sawchuk. Two stars if you love narrative poetry. Hockey fans, take heed; Terry Sawchuk fans, go nuts.

*

“Clifton’s work emphasizes endurance and strength through adversity,” reads a bio at The Poetry Foundation Web site. “Ronald Baughman suggested in his Dictionary of Literary Biography essay that Clifton’s ‘pride in being black and in being a woman helps her transform difficult circumstances into a qualified affirmation about the black urban world she portrays.’”