Laughing at the Abyss

My father used to read to me at bedtime when I was a kid. One of my favorite books was Louis Untermeyer’s anthology, The Golden Treasury of Poetry, with Blake, Dickinson, Whitman, Keats, Kipling, Sandburg. I can still hear my father’s slow southern cadence reciting a poem by my favorite writer, Anonymous:

The optimist fell ten stories. 

At each window bar
He shouted to his friends: 

"All right so far."

The first poet I ever heard read his own work was Philip Levine in the early 1980s, at Tufts. Phil was my teacher, and I sat on the floor of a rather august room as he stood there in jeans and running shoes, punctuating his brilliant, heart-stopping poems with a wry, dry humor. It was a schtick he had, ricocheting between jokes and staggering poems about toughing it out through love and work, poems delivered in a gravelly voice that seemed ready to catch, or swallow, what was about to come.

From Phil I learned about Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez and working guys in Detroit. He also told me that there was such a thing as graduate school for poetry, and where I should apply and where I should go. So, 40 summers ago, I drove my ’76 blue Chevy Nova from Boston to Iowa City. There, one of my teachers was Bill Knott, who drank instant iced tea from a large plastic tumbler and smoked cigarettes in a classroom with a large cardboard sign above the blackboard that said: NO SMOKING. Bill had published his first book under the name Saint Geraud, claiming to have been a virgin and a suicide. He was, of course, very much alive, then, and one of his poems would seem to be a companion piece to the one by Anonymous.

Advice from the Experts

I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter's curb while from
The building above a bunch of gawkers perched
Along its ledges urged me don't, don't jump.

Bill did time in an orphanage as a child and was no stranger to ledges; he also tended to balk at any sound advice that came his way. From Bill I learned about Hermetic poetry, about Basho and Issa and brevity and compression. I learned about jumping.

And from Gail Mazur I learned how dialogue can work in a poem. In “Evening,” she writes about her mother finding a robin’s egg:

“Are you keeping it warm?”
I ask—what am I thinking?—

And she: “Gail, I don’t want
a bird, I want a blue egg.”

It’s brutal, this borscht belt exchange—the mother making it clear to her daughter that what she wants is the beautiful idea of a bird, not the offspring itself.

***

Like a lot of writers, I’ve carried books around the way some people might carry scripture. This has included most of the books by James Tate, whose first collection little hinted at the antics to come. Nothing knee-slapping about a son gazing skyward at the father dead before he was born. Nothing funny in “Graveside,” an address to the Iowa City grave of Rodina Feldervatova. The lore was that if you climbed up the statue of the black angel there, at midnight, and stared into her eyes, you’d die within the year. Nearly all the young poets I knew back then gazed into those eyeless eyes, and all but one of us proved that folklore wrong.

How did the James Tate of The Lost Pilot become the James Tate of the absurd? Maybe that trajectory was in the DNA of those early poems, in the DNA of that poet. After all, what’s more surreal than a son addressing his never glimpsed, long dead, perpetually orbiting father, as he does in the title poem of that first collection:

All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead.

Martin Esslin writes that absurd drama “does not provoke tears of despair but the laughter of liberation.” So perhaps the evolution of a poet toward the zany or surreal is a form of natural selection, a way of countering the abyss. 

About the abyss, Bill Knott knew a thing or two million. Another of his short masterpieces goes like this:

Minor Poem

The only response
to a child's grave is
to lie down before it and play dead

Knott’s title gives us the double meaning of minor, with his signature self-deprecation and the status of the child. And that dark, unpunctuated humor says something about the unending nature of such grief.

Knott’s brevity and ruthlessness bring to mind the sly observations of Suzanne Buffam. Her most recent collection, A Pillow Book, serves up deliciously gimlet-eyed poems in the form of paragraphs or lists. Some are only one word, and some a little longer:

Guilty Pleasures

Beating a child at checkers.
Peeing in swimming pools.
Watching Dateline.
Drinking milk from the carton.
Glimpsing one’s neighbor at home in her curlers.
Glimpsing one’s neighbor at home in her curlers, watching
     Dateline, drinking milk from the carton.
A roaring fire in July.

Like comedians with perfect timing, poets can utter what a lot of people won’t. We might call that thing THE TRUTH––not to be confused with my truth or your truth. Or you could also call it, grâce à dieu, what keeps you from getting invited back for another long yawn of a garden party next door.