by David Wojahn
U. of Pittsburgh Press 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

Easy Baby Easy

In the 24 years since his first book was published, David Wojahn has remained a peripheral poet, a writer of strong narrative and elegy that’s consistently recognized as pretty good rather than pretty great. As you’d expect from a “selected” published two and a half decades into a poet’s career, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems collects some of the best work from his first six books alongside some equally good (if not better) new work. The book’s biggest success is its design; either the writer or his editors were able to distinguish a thread in Wojahn’s work, and the book builds a surprising arc between his present and past, finally holding up as a unit rather than a choppy sampling of earlier work. The book might not beat a confession out of you, but a lot of it is very…good.

The first section, titled “For the Poltergeists: New Poems,” is centered on a topic that Wojahn is hard pressed to ignore: the political climate. Flooded with anger at the Bush regime, Wojahn co-opts the voice of W himself: “Even my generals gasping—such dazzling display, / What thundering shock & awe had I made.” But more interesting than political-animal Wojahn is bleeding-heart Wojahn. “Scrabble with Matthews,” a new poem, crowns the elegiac side that’s dominated his career. In the poem, the poet imagines being snowed in at an airport with a fellow sad-hearted storytelling poet, the late-great William Matthews, who died unexpectedly from a heart attack in 1997 at the age of 55. The speaker had been Matthews’s “opening act” the night before, when Matthews read his “then-new poems” and spoke to the crowd:

“Why do you write
something nobody reads anymore?” queried one
little trust fund in a blazer. “Because
I’m willing to be honestly confused
& honestly fearful.”

Wojhan knows how to write a tribute because he allows the Matthews quote—verbatim, according to Wojahn—to stand as the strongest moment in the poem. Other elegies, including those for his father and for hard-luck story guru Raymond Carver, are equally gracious and strong.

Despite Wojahn’s propensity toward elegy, the real arc of the book deals with the narrator’s own story. The first line of the first poem suggests a father beaming with pride for his infant son: “Two new words a day & sometimes three—cup & doll, yesterday throat / & hot, hot hot.”  At first glance, he’s a guy annoyingly proud of his kid; in the end, you’re proud as hell for him. This first new poem reveals his fatherhood, which becomes important as we jump back in time to the older selections.  Ordered chronologically thereafter, we don’t return to the present until the book’s final section.  By that point it’s been learned through our modestly abashed narrator that he’s been unable, over the years, to impregnate his wife, referred to throughout as “N.” The book’s final poem, “Kill Born, Weed Smoke, Chk Mark, Onchola Senn,” is from his last book, 2002’s Spirit Cabinet and admits continued frustration at an inability to inseminate: “N.’s again unpregnant, / / & medicates herself downstairs / on murder mysteries.” Late that night, the narrator discovers a young couple that has trespassed on his property. The girl is sobbing, and consoled by a boyfriend repeating “easy baby, easy.”    

If you’re easily bored by narrative poetry, Wojahn won’t keep you around the way, say, Matthews might. He’s had some missteps, including an ill-advised series titled “Mystery Train (A Sequence)” that does a disinteresting job displaying a fusion of pop music and poetry. An attempt at showing “Lou Reed After the Wake of Delmore Schwartz” is particularly unfortunate: “The ‘ludes / I’d done were coming on. The room went numb.” More recent poems are bigger successes, especially the surprisingly welcome experimentation in “Crayola: A Sequence,” superhero-obsessed dual monologue that might not look or smell as sweet as a 64 box of Crayolas, but has its own magic.

Still Wojhan readily admits in a new poem that he’s among those thirsting to find, rather than be, a hero: “The hero chose silence—the likely choice a hero / will make. & unforgivable.” But having a child makes him seem hero enough. Interrogation Palace becomes important because it not only throws some new poems into the walk-the-line Wojahn canon, but adds a new chapter to the man’s story. At last, by way of what is apparently artificial insemination, he’s been able to conceive. It’s the best of Wojahn, and while it might not leave you running to email the anthologists, you might find you’d like to pat him on the back and buy him a beer.

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