The Dead and their Sucker Punch: A poem by Dorrianne Laux

Dorrianne Laux is one of our best free verse poets. She can write about everyday things and easily comprehend emotions clearly and with some genius of expression. She serves the situation with a fine, delicate balancing of the prosaic, the simple phrasing, and the higher allure of lyric speech and allows neither for overwhelming the other. Her poems, often time presented to us in the guise of prose, has an intimacy rare among a generation of poets who maintain distance from their most volatile emotion; her poems have the power of revelation, of someone sorting through old photographs or a rediscovered journal which, while recounting their day, gets a high pitch in their voice as they realize something even they hadn't realized. Laux never forgets herself as a writer with a goal; fret not, there is a point she comes to, the payoff one expects to make the listing of a poet's personal world resonate in ways it otherwise wouldn't. 

 She is suspicious of rhetorical resolutions to real problems and relationships that inhabit her poems and offers instead an intimate tone, the voice of someone who begins to tell you a story after some arduous activity which then lays herself bare. Not a confession, not dumping of toxic emotion, but a revelation, possibly at the very instance when the clarity comes to her; all the bits and pieces of past events with family, husbands, friends who have passed on are now a whole. Her poetry quite often is something extraordinary, intimate, moving. I found this poem fitting for the month since both my parents died in August at different times. Since then, the month has been a bit touchy for the family, but we collectively give a shrug and move on with nary a pause to linger over the lives of the couple born the four of us. One grieves, commemorates, and then moves on, right? Not so fast; sometimes, in the middle of watching a television program or waiting for the bus, something falls inside of me. It's the sensation you'd imagine having inside an elevator whose cable had been suddenly cut. The bad news hits you again, and yet again, if you let it. Laux's poem on the matter speaks to me and punches me in the gut to coin a phrase.

How It Will HappenWhen /Dorrianne Laux

 

There you are, exhausted from a night of crying, curled up on the couch, the floor, at the foot of the bed, anywhere you fall you fall down crying, half amazed at what the body is capable of, not believing you can cry anymore. And there they are, his socks, his shirt, your underwear and your winter gloves, all in a loose pile next to the bathroom door, and you fall down again. Someday, years from now, things will be different, the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows shining, sun coming in easily now, sliding across the high shine of wax on the wood floor. You'll be peeling an orange or watching a bird spring from the edge of the rooftop next door, noticing how, for an instant, its body is stopped on the air, only a moment before gathering the will to fly into the ruff at its wings and then doing it: flying. You'll be reading, and for a moment there will be a word you don't understand, a simple word like now or what or is and you'll ponder over it like a child discovering language. Is you'll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that's when you'll say it, for the first time, out loud: He's dead. He's not coming back. And it will be the first time you believe it.

This speaker is talking about spending a period of her life trying to talk herself into accepting the loss of her dearly departed, and goes on from there to talk about a life that seems detached, dreamlike; there is an unreal calm in this world as she struggles to push on. Laux isn't contradicting herself but instead talking about the transition from merely mouthing the conventional platitudes of acceptance of a loss and the eventual, inevitable realization that her friend's absence is permanent. She is emotionally numb, so far as I can tell, until it hits hurt, triggered by what some small matter acutely detailed her when the artifice comes apart, and the fact of her friend's absence hits hard, almost like being struck. 

 Artifice includes ritual, is the compulsive house cleaning one occupies their time with while acting as if that they're moving on with their life; the activity and the manic obsession with the details of these tasks are, for me, a conspicuous clue that there is something the person would rather not deal with. There's an intuitive leap here. The poem's power is the quick but not illogical insertion of the final remark, that instance when you realize a loved one isn't returning. Laux shows that a feeling like this is like a sudden attack, coming from seeming nowhere, leaving you in what I could only describe as a state of shock. This is not a formal argument she is making; this has that eliding quality few poets capture well, the revelation expressed as if we're witnessing the thought coming to the narrator as she speaks. The "clean house" Laux mentions, with everything neatly arranged and placed in their place, every trace of the person is gone or tucked in some burnished-over corner:

the house clean for once, everything in its place, windows shining, sun coming in easily now, skimming across the thin glaze of wax on the wood floor. (...)

"the absence of pain is mistaken as solace, and the narrator tries to sustain a numbness in her household. But comes undone, inevitably; the years the person had resided in those rooms, the small, shared rituals and pet phrases on familiar furniture have absorbed something of his spirit, it seems, and a memory is triggered, a flash comes upon the narrator. This is an apt metaphor for the attempt to deal with a loss by discarding personal reminders of the departed; the house is "clean," as in emotionally neutral, the goal is that he would be a reclaimed and re-imagined space where comes not to grow but to not feel, not a feel a thing. Those who are gone remain in the details regardless of who hard we scrub the floors or repair the roof:

You’ll be reading, and for a moment you’ll see a word you don’t recognize, a simple words like cup or gate or wisp and you’ll ponder like a child discovering language. Cup, you’ll say over and over until it begins to make sense, and that’s when you’ll say it, for the first time, out loud: He’s dead.

Although he was burned and the household has been scoured and cleared of reminders that he once lived there, the space cannot be converted as if nothing had happened before. It's circular; what we toss out comes back to us.

He’s not coming back, and it will be the first time you believe it.

This is beautifully done, a setup for someone telling you that they've accepted life on life's terms, with the strong suggestion that they have exhausted their allotment of emotion, only to be struck once again that they've lost something valuable that cannot be replaced. The narrator is at the precipice, the classic existential situation: aware, finally, of the facts of her life as a felt experience, it remains her choice to stay in stasis and so become bitter and reclusive, or to finally, truthfully let go of what she's held onto and take new risks.

Billy Collins Reflects Rod Serling

470 331 522

"Seraphine": It's how you make it long

For a time after my UCSD years, I was a bit of a film dilettante , and felt cheated if a film was a merely ninety minutes long; I equated length with seriousness of intent and integrity , the way some people consider thick novels to be necessarily better than shorter ones. Getting older makes one discerning about what they’re willing to sit through and put up with, for many reasons, but for me it comes down to not having the patience to wait for a film to start to work. Time adjusted my aesthetics with my attention span. I liked Seraphine formally—the director Martin Provost did a fine job with his composition, and suggested a period in war time convincingly without turning this thing into a turgid, Scorsese-inflected costume drama, and it was a well down outlay of who this woman was, what her world was like, both private and public, and I was impressed with the way the artist’s process was incorporated into the narrative. Her mania to please her guardian angels, endearingly played by the reticent presence of actress Yolanda Moreau, was an intriguing back story to the obsessive art making, from the way she gathered her materials for her paints, the preparation of her pigments, and then the actual painting , with her fingers, on the floor, as if she were wrestling with a large vision that was resisting being captured on canvas. But it was long, very long, too long, and I found myself, like you, perhaps, getting a little antsy; maybe I’ve been seduced by the brutal efficiency and convenience of Hollywood narrative style, but I wanted the pace to pick up. It’s interesting that a director like Clint Eastwood has made a number of movies that one would consider slow-moving—Mystic River, Letters from Iwo Jima –but not consider glacial in the time it takes to watch them all the way through.

 The difference, I suppose, is that Eastwood , an admirer of European film making no less than any of us in the audience, remembers the best that Hollywood has taught him and remembered that movies are things that move. There’s always something going on, some bit of dialogue and visual cue that sets you for some satisfying dramatic complications. Eastwood, I suppose, would be a film maker who has wed a French eye for the small detail, the love of incidental things that make up a world he’s exploring, with the emotional impact of his masters, John Ford and John Houston. Provost, who’s work I’m not wholly familiar with, and tended to wear me out after a while. Lovely images, of course—I liked the final image of Seraphine hauling the chair out to the large tree so that she can be in environment that can enable her to find some psychic peace—but I wanted less of her and more of the others. 

Eastwood is amazing because he has an instinct in setting up dramatic contrasts, two strong minded characters having to clash, negotiate, argue, battle, make peace in dramatically plausible contexts. I wanted more about the critic and his world, his attempts to sell Seraphine’s paintings and the circumstances, cultural, social, economic, political , as to why she never ascended to the ranks of Picasso or Rousseau. The story needed to move beyond being solely about the title character and develop the lives and worlds of the people who interacted with her. The movie’s flaw is that the poor cleaning woman is the only one who is given any kind of complexity, a fact that allows the movie to remain in place, static. An interest in another character or two , with personalities amounting to more than the brief significations of the dialogue, likely would have given this beautifully mounted project a brisker tempo.

Hemingway, the Prolix Dry Drunk

Moreintelligentlife.com has a story provocatively called "When Novelists Sober Up", luring the curious reader with a hint that laying down the bottle is not necessarily the best thing for the writer's art. We have instead a gutless amalgamation of the usual tropes about bards and scribes cursed with the hooch bug; it's a shuffle through the old cards..It is, in general, a bad thing for those who have it and for those around them, and hinders, erodes, destroys, with time, whatever talent or good graces a person might already have. That we still in large measure glorify booze as a needed ingredient to creative process is evidence of a sad business: we make it okay for certain social types to destroy themselves so they can fulfill our vague idea of what an artist needs to do in society. Considering that we have no consensus as to the role of the artist in our affairs reveals our muddled thinking on alcoholism even more.

An excellent book on the subject is "The Thirsty Muse:Alcohol and the American Writer" by Thomas Dardis. Though there were some writers in this study who remained productive and frequently good during their worst imbibing, they are exceptions, with the general scenario for the alcoholic being tragic and, worse, predictable. The talent that was already theirs to use was soon enough diminished by hoot ch, and careers were ended early.

What was especially irritating in this was author Tom Shone's occasional gaffes in describing a writer's style; he announces that writers of short sentences tend to fair better in sobriety than those more grandiose, opining that the "endless clauses" of Fitzgerald and Hemingway doomed them to unpleasant late careers. Hemingway? And I had thought that Papa, with his short sentences and stingy use of verbs, adjectives and metaphors was the prototypical minimalist, akin to Carver and Elmore Leonard later in the century.

How to be flawed

Mad TV had a dating service parody called Lowered Expectations that ran for a season or so, the gist of which were the absolutely undateable citizens looking for other undateables to hang with . The effect was sadder than it was funny--the sight of characters with intractable personality quirks trying a last ditch effort to find companionship through a whimpering admission of their grosser assets. Loneliness is an ungainly crucible for anyone to bear, whether super star or twitching wretch; the confession in the Mad parodies were losers begging for love, the assumption being that those who fall short, perhaps far short , of our insane standards of style and hipness suffer from a magnified self loathing. Which is why I like this poem by Cecilia Woloch. It's a declaration of what's- really-here, the words of someone who is unapologetic about their faults, perhaps a bit embarrassed by some of them, but not ashamed of any of them. It's not in-your-face like the monotonous products of slam poets can be--this is a monologue on a human scale, a bit of a conversation we come in the middle of, a splendid speech that fills in what we've missed without the digression of backward-motion narrative. Woloch is curt, crisp, and sharp in her lines, and manages to be take-me-or-leave-me-alone without being a full time jerk. I like this poem.

FIREFLIES
by Cecilia Woloch

And these are my vices:
impatience, bad temper, wine,
the more than occasional cigarette,
an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed,
a hunger that isn't hunger
but something like fear, a staunching of dread
and a taste for bitter gossip
of those who've wronged me -- for bitterness --
and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart
to children whose names I don't even know
and driving too fast and not being Buddhist
enough to let insects live in my house
or those cute little toylike mice
whose soft grey bodies in sticky traps
I carry, lifeless, out to the trash
and that I sometimes prefer the company of a book
to a human being, and humming
and living inside my head
and how as a girl I trailed a slow-hipped aunt
at twilight across the lawn
and learned to catch fireflies in my hands,
to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering
onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels.

WAHRENBROCK'S BOOK HOUSE, RIP: A Letter from Dennis Wills

Wahrenbrock's Book House, a literary resource in San Diego for decades, has suddenly closed it's doors forever. Information about the reason for the abrupt closure is scant, and the loss of this store leaves a significant gap in San Diego's reading and cultural life. Bookseller Dennis Wills, owner of D.G.Wills Books , was a good friend of the esteemed late owner Chuck Valverde and wrote this letter to all who've loved and found solace in Wahrenbrock's crowded stacks, finding the odd, the unusual, the rare, the crucial book they had in mind when they entered the store. Dennis expresses as well as anyone can the gravity of the loss:

To whom it may concern:

I have just learned that Wahrenbrock's Book House will close. While I remain unaware of any pertinent details which may have led to such a decision, I heartily implore any powers that be to reconsider the grave and momentous implications of such a decision. Sylvia Beach, publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses and owner of the renowned Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the most famous bookstore in the world at the time, was compelled to close down the store in the 1940s only because occupying German soldiers threatened to confiscate their inventory.

While Vernon Wahrenbrock may have founded Wahrenbrock's Book House in San Diego in 1935, for two generations booksellers and book buyers from around the world have come to know this flagship bookshop repository in this part of the United States as entirely a reflection of the work and the personality of Chuck Valverde and his very able colleague Jan Tonnesen. While Chuck is no longer with us in person, his legacy continues onward as reflected by the vast holdings of inventory available to the many thousands of gentle book lovers who seek out Wahrenbrock's from throughout the world, but also from the thousands of arcane and unusual items listed on the internet. To deny the book public throughout the world access to these vast holdings would be a terrible tragedy.

I sincerely hope and implore that some transitional equation may be created that will allow the legacy of Chuck Valverde to continue. The loss not only to the world but especially to the countless thousands of San Diegans who frequent Wahrenbrock's constantly is inestimable and unimaginable.

Sincerely,

Dennis G. Wills
D.G.Wills Books
La Jolla Cultural Society
www.dgwillsbooks.com

Poetry is what ever gets you to the next page

There is a long history of poets and critics declaring poetry is something completely other than prose, a separate art approximating a form of meta-writing that penetrates the circumscribed certainties of words and makes them work harder, in service to the imagination, to reveal the ambiguity that is at the center of a literate population's perception. An elitist art, in other words, that by the sort of linguistic magic the poet generates sharpens the reader's wits; it would be interesting if someone conducted a study of the spread of manifestos, from competing schools of writing, left and right, over the last couple of hundred of years and see if there is connecting insistence at the heart of the respective arguments. 

 What they'd find among other things, I think, is a general wish to liberate the slumbering population from the doldrums of generic narrative formulation and bring them to a higher, sharper, more crystalline understanding of the elusive quality of Truth; part of what makes poetry appealing is not just the actual verse interesting (and less interesting ) poets produce, but also their rationale as to why they concern themselves with making words do oddly rhythmic things. Each poet who is any good and each poet who is miserable as an artist remains, by nature, didactic, chatty, and narcissistic to the degree that, as a species, they are convinced that their ability to turn a memorable ( or at least striking phrase) is a key with which others may unlock Blake's Doors of Perception. The lecturing component is only as intriguing as good as the individual writer can be--not all word slingers have equal access to solid ideas or an intriguing grasp of innovative language--but the majority of readers don't want to be edified. They prefer entertainment to enlightenment six and half days out of the week, devouring Oprah book club recommendations at an even clip; the impulse with book buyers is a distraction, a diversion from the noise of the world. 

Even the clearest and most conventional of verse, poetry is seen as only putting one deeper into the insoluble tangle of experience. Not that it's a bad thing, by default, to be distracted, as I love my superhero movies and shoot 'em ups rather than movies with subtitles, and I don't think it's an awful thing for poetry to have a small audience. In fact, I wouldn't mind at all if all the money spent on trying to expand the audience was spent on more modest presentations. The audience is small, so what has changed?