by Bill Zavatsky
Hanging Loose Press 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough
The Unmuted Second-Stringer
Bill Zavatsky is an excellent bench player for the New York School, and one of the strong points of Hanging Loose’s team. Left-handed as that is, I mean it as a compliment. Can we say for sure where the ’96 Yankees have wound up if Charlie Hayes had flubbed that ninth-inning pop-up? Where would Earl Weaver’s Orioles have been without John Lowenstein, or the mid-80’s Mets without Rusty Staub? OK, don’t answer that last one. Zavatsky’s strength is the hard-earned knowledge of second-stringers gained from his ten years as a jazz pianist playing in obscure clubs.
Zavatsky published his first book of poems in 1975. By then, he had already worked as a jazz pianist and critic. Since then, he has become known for his work with SUN press, and his award-winning translations of Andre Breton. I am impressed by the variety of subject matter and tone in X Marks the Spot, and the appealing focus he has brought to thirty years of work. Given Zavatsky’s love of the occasional and themed poem, he has recently been better represented in anthologies than his own books. In certain circles, he has achieved an almost Gump-like ubiquity while killing the fewest trees. Instead of stressing his surrealist credentials, his new book favors his disarmingly accessible take on confessional poetry (I’m convinced there’s no such thing as confessional poetry, but that’s another review). He makes us look at his (and our) least flattering moments in a less psychologically claustrophobic, more humorous way than we might expect. All this is welcome, even if Zavatsky is more comfortable than most at wearing his heart on his sleeve. It depends on what you expect art to do.
In his essay, “Civilization and its Opposite in the 1940’s,” Guy Davenport suggests a dichotomy that describes American art of the period: “muteness” and “song.” He suggests that “song” would be folkloric art, filled with stories and myth; and that “muteness” would “elegantly subjugate subject matter to (an abstract) style.” Davenport then complains that muteness has been the rage: that too few appreciate the spiritual pulse of Charles Burchfield, for example, because it is almost too out in the open, somehow indecent in what it reveals, too individualistic to place in cold, neat categories that all the muteness-loving, professorial art critics prefer.
Zavatsky will have none of this categorical crankiness. Early on in the book, “Evita” neatly shows two characters on the subway, a silent black woman “whose face has been painted completely white,” and a man singing songs from the musical Evita in a Spanish accent. The singer sees the woman, and doing “a perfect silent-movie double take,” he proceeds to sing the rest of his songs to her, dancing around the pole, becoming so absorbed with his song and dance that he fails to notice when she leaves the train. When the doors open for Columbus Circle, he is blocked by a hesitant passenger, and instantly transforms into a real New Yorker: “Hey! C’monin or out!” flapping his hands, “I gotta get to work!” It is not a question of decency—though it turns out the two characters have nothing to say to each other, it is because both of them hide behind their memorable masks.
A standout pair of poems about Bill Evans makes a similar point concerning abstraction and emotion in art. My favorite is the poem addressed to the audience heard on the historic recordings at the Village Vanguard in July, 1961. The poem is not as much about what Evans was doing on stage, but what the audience was doing: chattering away, clinking dishes, ordering drinks. He wonders if they now listen to the recording, point to their chattering voices, and say, “Hey, honey— that’s me“. Beyond these barbs, he wishes he could help them hear the miracle occurring right in front of them, to distract them from their distracted lives:
I’ve wanted to see them stiffen and cry out,
“Oh, my God! You mean that, that was going on
across the room from my martini?”
“I missed the whole damn thing
for that worthless man I spent twenty
of the worst years of my life with!”
The poem ends: “Listen, I’m putting on the first track now. Hear it if you couldn’t hear it then, wherever you are, whoever you were that day.”
The other is an elegy originally printed in the liner notes for Evans’ last completed album, You Must Believe in Spring. The poem does not shy away from its birth as a liner note (The CD art also includes a reproduction of a “singing” Charles Burchfield painting, one of those spring ones where bare, March branches reach up to a radiant ball of light). The poem gracefully accepts its occasional nature, the river of its grief. Together, these poems help us question the critical canard that Evans’ early, more abstract music was his only great work, and that late Evans was only drowning in his own tears. Though he normally favors the expressive mode, Zavatsky knows the expressive and the mute are equally well masked; that it is a mistake to think of one mode as more artistically relevant.
This is the chief wisdom of Where X Marks the Spot. There is no shying away from emotion, as well as the ways we use to hide from it. In “My Uncle at the Wake” the speaker, trying to understand his childhood, obsessively asks his uncle about why he reached out to him all those years ago; only the final line reveals that the man lying in the coffin is the speaker’s father.
One of the very few places in the book his balance falters though, is the eight-page poem “Beetle,” about his cat dying of cancer. The poem wallows in Beetle’s pathetic last days in a desperate, clinging way. There is a suggestion that the cat’s death is a stand-in for the death of his father, but this is weighted like the surprisingly feathery thing the dead cat becomes. In contrast to the previous poem about his father, the suggestion of silent depth is not leveraged enough to balance the cloying sentimentality expressed on the surface. My exemplar modern cat elegy is admittedly a leap, but I think Louis MacNeice’s “The Death of A Cat” (also fairly long), for all its obvious manner is a better poem partly because of its sprightly catalogue of cat-ness recalling Christopher Smart’s “For My Cat Jeoffry,” and partly because it is addressed to a second person rather than the cat.
Another high point is a poem about a greasy, grasping bandleader named Danny, who promotes an incompetent but gorgeous singer during the band’s gig at a Bridgeport, CT strip club, mostly to get her in bed. The poem turns on the speaker’s inability to reach out to the singer as she runs off stage, crying, knowing she has failed. The speaker realizes that he had been distracted by his own greasy fantasies about the stripper. Another poem tells about Steve Royal, who could have been a major league pitcher, but had to stop because of a weak heart. Though Royal became an excellent saxophonist who had brief stints with famous bands, he ended up playing at high school dances. Unlike Zavatsky and his other young friends, Steve was confident enough with his own life that he never felt cheated that he couldn’t leave his family and his roots behind for fame or art.
Zavatsky cites Harvey Shapiro as “mentor and friend.” While he has Shapiro’s accessibility and self-deprecating humor, Zavatsky is miles away from Shapiro’s tense, gnomic wisdom, yet disarming enough (except for the cat poem) to nudge me off my critical high horse—perhaps the just-goofy-enough author photo helped my mood. I haven’t quoted many lines, but the humorous and touching surprises in these poems rarely turn on a dime—these poems are at their best read whole. In X Marks the Spot, Bill Zavatsky puts his volubility in its best light. He knows that despite our best intentions we probably can’t talk ourselves into wisdom; but he believes we might be able to talk ourselves into more toleration, compassion, and humor, towards ourselves and others. And in the end, that’s pretty good.
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