by Ed Pavlic
University of Georgia Press 2008
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

“…They don’t trust themselves alone in the dark.”

A singer uses vowels.

Poetry deals in freaks, whether the poets themselves or their pseudo-creations and characterizations.  A true weirdo would have to begin the rented space by falling in the window backwards, as in a reversal from the possibility of continually becoming gravity’s victim.  “Laughing and singing, “Only way to enter a room full of friends, fall in backward thru the window.””  

There never can be an honest account of the reasons an artist (human being, for that matter) would take his or her own life.  Do not wade into the murk of Camus’s or Pollock’s car wrecks.  And make sure not to high dive into the mind of Jimi Hendrix’s or Elliot Smith’s manic depression.  If so, wear a flotation device, night goggles, and a strong will to remain in sanity’s house of mirrors.

This must have been the task Ed Pavlic prepared for when writing his 2008 collection of poems, Winners Have Yet to Be Announced: a Song for Donny Hathaway.  Perhaps Pavlic and many other poets feel a version of what Hathaway is put on display for, something like this:

And, I want to talk, man, bad.  Hand over all my records for one conversation.  Hand over all my—well, half my money . . . Serious.  Simple things.  Sit and talk and be there, man.  Hold hands and talk.  Talk, hear me, let the roof come in.  Hand over a shoulder.  Let the fucking doors freeze shut.  With anyone.

The poet here rises to a skyscraping task of recreating the ethereal and concrete landscape that an inventively driven genius-musician succumbs to when the old, reluctantly forgotten bright beacons come back to blind.  There is rarely a moment when Pavlic makes a hero out of Hathaway.  But, you will never forget the multiplicity of voices flying all around your reader head like a Charles Dickens metropolis.  A reader might drift over the canyons of the difficulties of genius, of artistry, of depression, et cetera.  Pavlic leads in this direction, however:

Fewer, however, have come to account for how very difficult it is to be, you know, a person.

Check Woolf, Camus, Nietzsche and many U.S. troops (oh, and that one math dude that Russell Crowe played) in the coat room because you have heard of them.  And because they are white.  It is the rarest of occasions to have to lift your own (white) veil of invisibility and understand that depression can come from various acute and obtuse angles.  The acute, in the case of the observing poet as well as the musician (Pavlic/Hathaway) is the madness, the misunderstandings, the little addings-up which rarely fade.  The obtuse—American Racism.  Pavlic never comes out and says it in its black/white form because his subtlety hides in the various file cabinets of paintings and songs being discussed.  But the big cotton and tobacco plantation demon is there.  Look at this line from a prose block where Hathaway is telling a lost man from the East St. Louis projects how audiences can be:

They don’t even give you a chance.  They don’t trust themselves alone in the dark.

All the poems swim in their own prose block; there is the rare occasion of the usual, left-margin, line-break poem.  They seem and look, at their shell, as normal as Robert Bly or Richard Hugo; but, in fact, they are as experimental, Freudian, and even Deleuzeian as a poem can get.  There truly is not a better poetic medium for these slightly-real documentarian, authenticating statements that Pavlic allows a breath more like a quiet, influenza cough.  His poems don’t dance; they stomp out a blues diction and exist on the very border he creates; which, is also the border where all things real occur—the backslash between happy/sad.  Think of Golden Gates and Brooklyn Bridges.

The book is brilliant, not hipster or on the cusp like flarf but it possesses a conceptualism of process, of tiny details and necessary magnifying glasses.

Readers go backward (like the man falling in the window) through time and then forward again.  Hathaway’s timeline is incredibly interesting, as it is.  He put out his first solo recordings in early  1970, gained fame from his proximal amity with Roberta Flack (the woman who first sang that one song that Lauryn Hill got limelight for), wrote three film scores (one with Quincy Jones) and checked himself in and out of madhouses a few more times.  He studied classical music on his own, scored off-the-chains on two different IQ tests, and held a couple summer-long Brooklyn arts camps for underprivileged children.  Ruben Studdard can’t touch him; Justin Timberlake claims he is his own biggest influence; Common says he’d be on a lost path without the earthly/wraithlike presence of Hathaway.  And innumerable electronic/hip-hop producers sample his sound.  Pavlic/the poet’s best summation of all this legend-quintessence happens here:

They’ll say they come to hear you sing to forget their troubles. And then there’ll be you, in a room that moves when you move, with a voice that’s a search from the next open opening inside of all the will and won’t and will and won’t want and won’t and won’t will and need and don’t want and need and can’t have. And need and can’t have. And need and can’t have [. . .] Need.  Should have to have a permit just to use that word.

If we are to believe anything in Pavlic’s Real World-esque recreations, Hathaway (like many poets, musicians and artists) despised and loved his audience while simultaneously using that phenomenon to understand his-self and his World.  This is non-fiction poetry couched in a metaphysical dream coated in a tincture of madness.  A reader cannot make it thru the tunnel of Winners Have Yet to Be Announced without losing sight of light at the end while also becoming a little mad his- or herself.  When Pavlic writes:  “All the time his eyes on you like they’re staring through barbed wire,” he is not playing.  Readers will be schooled on the nuances between quietude, silence, noise, and schizoid-paranoia—“A sound like a conversation between face-down cards” or “Like in the silent way your body learns a song.” One can only imagine the kind of mad-trip Pavlic must have taken his own self on in order to write this thing. 

Flaubert said that the life of a poet is a dog’s life.  Pavlic (in this book, at least) then becomes a Siberian husky, multi-hued eyes and all.  Hathaway, no doubt, heard voices; Pavlic channels them through crystal or a ham radio—something that he must have thought all of humanity (at least those who read in English) could relate to in a personal space.  And if James Dickey was right when he said, “Poets are not trying to tell the truth, are they?  They are trying to show God a few things he maybe didn’t think of,” then Pavlic hoists Hathaway on his shoulders and casts off any misgivings that the true human being, the true freak and weirdo camp out on the state line between mortal and immortal.  Let Pavlic’s statement display that very notion:  “You wake me up in the midnight hour and I’ll tell you how I feel.”

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