by Randall Mann
University of Chicago Press 2009
Reviewed by Stephen Fellner
Dear Randall Mann,
When I finished your book of poems Breakfast with Thom Gunn, my competing reactions were these: I was bummed it was over (it felt way too short), while at the same time, I knew if the book were any longer it would hurt your project. Let me explain: I see you as one of our most successful practitioners of Light Verse, an undervalued and underexplored poetry genre these days. How could one not feel excited with such nifty, short, rhyming triumphs like “Ovid in San Francisco,” “Ganymede on Polk Street,” and “Modern Art”? To add more poems to your brief volume would take away the strategic effect of offering us quick, endless punchlines and surprises.
One of the wonderful aspects of Light Verse is it (deceptively) seems as easy as a dumb, faithless fuck. It can leave the mind as quickly, too. But you can’t stop wanting more. Almost every one of your poems is a trick, vanishing at the point of climax. They don’t weigh me down with needless talk, don’t overstay their welcome. They lead to awesome exits.
Take the final two stanzas of the ostensibly benignly titled “Song”:
(One time, I swear to God,
I fucked for weeks and weeks.)
These queens arrive, all prim,
And talk about antiquesand art, boring stuff.
But when they snort the best
crystal money can buy?
They beg to sit on my fist.
Yes, it seems that an aspect of your poetic project is to offer a contemporary rewrite of Thom Gunn’s work, giving it a bit more of a self-consciously daring spin. And these days we undoubtedly need that. With Proposition 8 in the foreground of our queer consciousnesses, some of us queers too often fall into self-consciousness, overdeterminedly falling into the pitfalls of self-censorship. (If I see one more gay male movie [or gay male himself] prodding us to get married and adopt a brat, I’ll ruin the relationship and sell the runt to the black-market.) Do we need any more desexualized, dull queers? I wanted to hang out with the unapologetically shameless narrator in “Career” who seduces a respected poet for help with his book. Here’s the inspired opening:
A younger poet wrote to ask
an older for a blurb.
The older poet said Perhaps,
which meant Do Not Disturb.But when the older poet saw
a photo of the lad,
the older man dipped his pen
and wrote that he’d be gladto offer up the richest praise…
As you confirm in “Fetish,” “Beauty, our politics, is local.” In “Election Day,” you contradict yourself with a paradox that—paradoxically—can be easily explained:
…Tired
of the age of irony, everything
a gesture; tired of the word gesture,
the day endsas the world will end:…
The final line of that poem shows us an image of our sad political state with “uncounted ballots floating in the bay.” Definitely one of my favorites.
There are a few missteps, such as the title poem, “Breakfast with Thom Gunn.” Do gay men do breakfast? (Your narrator seems like the type who’d do brunch, after waking up too late from a night of screwing.) I wish the speaker had a more idiosyncratic relationship with Gunn and his body (of work). The narrator “gushes” here but not much else. Also, as in some of Gunn’s weaker literary moments, from time to time, the characters in a few of the poems devolve into uninspired self-pity. For instance, here’s from the poem “Ruin”:
I had a birthday yesterday. It’s mine:
perversion, self-deceit, nostalgia, rain.
(My stop. I’ll brush against a dozen men
before I disembark into the rain
an older, rumpled man, If life is ruin,
then let it burn like Rome, like Dante’s ruin).
Or the perfunctory, pithy closure to “Last Call”:
Now the queen has gone,
gone again
in search of love,
in search of sin.It’s closing time.
You were not at fault.
I drain my glass
and lick the salt.
But all books have disappointments. This is a substantial improvement over your first book, which relied much more on these moves. Your current book is a lot of fun and almost never dull. (Mark Doty could learn a lot from you these days. I found myself wishing he’d had a place at the Inauguration, that is, as long as he avoided talking about dogs and middle-class excursions to Provincetown. But what happened to the days of his wonderful “Atlantis,” an inevitable tome for any gay poet?)
Ican’t help share a few more of your best verses:
I know that love is more than leather,
a tight white shirt, a good stink-
tonight, I am a fetish. I am canonical.
(“Fetish”)I want to leave this place
demeaned. It ought to leave a welt or rash.
Tonight, the corridors smell of bleach,
cherry air-freshener, and far too much
ambition.
(“Intimacy”)
And I believe in any successful letter, the writer needs to offer a specific remembrance of the receiver. So: here’s one more solid excerpt of your work that, appropriately, leaves me smiling and content just as this letter reaches the moment of its disappearance:
Off in the trees-that’s high silviculture
The slug in the yard has its desired effect;
love becomes a fritillary. Lucky thing we bought a day-pass
before everything went dolally…
(“Poetry”)
Much respect,
Stephen Fellner
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