Diane Seuss on The Book of Daniel, poems by Aaron Smith
I was traveling light on a recent stint as a visiting professor in a city far from home, my clothes in a garbage bag, my dog at my side, so I brought only a few books to keep me company. Along with Rimbaud and Woolf, I brought Aaron Smith, whose newest collection, The Book of Daniel, is so unostentatious, so unadorned by distraction or prettiness or faux-heroics, that it keeps my own bullshit artistry at bay. I need Aaron Smith like others need whiskey, or love.
Smith announces his aesthetic in poem one, “I Need My O’Hara Frank.” In terse two-line stanzas, he expresses his need, not his preference, for Frank O’Hara over actress Maureen O’Hara, Lucille Clifton over Lucille Ball, and his “Audre, // always, to be Lorde.” What a glorious way to open a book, with an unapologetic announcement of its speaker’s chosen literary ancestors and pop culture heroes (Olds, Duhamel, Etheridge Knight, Prince, Brad Pitt, and both Thomas and Tom Hardy), his dismissals, and his forthright personality and diction.
There is something of Williams in this and other poems in the collection — the humor and artistry of the spare — but also of Frank O’Hara, who had opinions and expressed them without fear of reprisal. From O’Hara’s parodic manifesto “Personism” — ” I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff.” Like Smith, he laced his poems with an array of highbrow artists and lowbrow pop culture icons, from Lana Turner to Rachmaninoff.
For Smith, it’s O’Hara himself, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Cher (“Does anyone have / a poem to Cher?”), and Karen Carpenter. “I tried / to write a poem about her: ‘Karen Carpenter starving / on the stereo’ was the only good line.” This isn’t simply name-dropping; it’s not simple at all. It establishes the lay of the land, the pantheon of weirdos, hotties, sufferers, and survivors who populate Smith’s imagination (I imagine) and kept him alive as a queer kid growing up in Cottageville, West Virginia, a hotbed of Christian fundamentalism, in the house were his mother was raised and where, earlier this year, she died. “In the 80s I was afraid of AIDS. Dad called gay men/AIDS fags. I drew naked men with colored pencils — my little-boy hand / scribbling armpits. I drew bullet holes in their bodies and mom caught me. / Mom cried when she found out I was gay. Mom told me to get AIDS and die.”
Smith’s pushback on fundamentalism, fueled by decades of pain, is searing: “A preacher in my hometown / was arrested for sexting a 15-year-old male … I know all Christians don’t fuck children, / but I don’t care anymore about nuance, / or Catholics.” “The Bible says there’ll be no backbiters in the kingdom/of heaven. Or vampires. Or buttfuckers. Or power- / bottoms, oh my!” Oh my, indeed.
The counterbalance to this unmasking is Smith’s full disclosure of his own fantasy life, which is rich, and a hoot, and sad. “It’s lazy when neighbors say: He was quiet / and kept to himself. Even serial killers have clichés. / Killers are always men. Men. Jamie Dornan / in The Fall is the sexiest. I wish he’d serial kill me.” Even the collection’s title, The Book of Daniel, which I imagined was a reference to the biblical Daniel, exiled visionary of the apocalypse — I mean it fits — is actually the title Smith gave to his Daniel Craig scrapbook. “I fell in love with Daniel Craig / when he was stalked by a man in Enduring Love — before he was Bond-hot and too famous.”
In keeping with the clichés about serial killers are the banal, internalized, shaming, and brutalizing clichés about male beauty that snake through the book, and Smith doesn’t use filters when grappling with them. “We know what we know when we know it, / I said to a guy on a blind date // who thought I was too plain to have dinner with: / I just want to be upfront, not waste our time. /I tried to make him feel better for treating me/like shit …” The self-judgments, internalized, rise up: “I hate my neck in photographs and consulted a plastic surgeon. / I don’t care if you think I’m shallow as long as you think I’m thin — / I either made that up or heard it in a movie.”
Smith doesn’t spare the poetry world. “When did poetry become youth culture, / curated personas, unrevised, and everyone / saying they’re brilliant?” The book is unabashedly literary, though not highbrow, and delightfully opinionated. In a poem called “A Critical History of Contemporary American Poetry,” he lays it out: “Elizabeth Bishop is like Meryl Streep — / you have to say she’s the best whether you believe it or not.” “Robert Lowell had bad glasses.” “Susan Howe much more can I take?” – and on it goes. His delivery is like a stand-up comedian on fire, having been called “faggot” and been pushed to the margins one too many times. In “The Pulitzer Prize,” he exposes the prize system by mashing it up with ultimate reality. “He won the Pulitzer Prize / and died. She won the Pulitzer / and also died. He died, / but before he died, he won, / too. He won a prize / that wasn’t important / and died.” The delivery is flat. The barb is edged with diamonds.
Smith loves the poetry he loves, and he hates platitudes. A five-line poem is titled with a quotation; “Poetry can save the world!” His response: “and I knew/this bitch // didn’t live / in the same // world as me.” He loves poetry, but he doesn’t always love the right poetry. “Her Blue Body Everything We Know” is a paean to women poets like Alice Walker, author of the first book of poems Smith bought with his own money, at “Waldenbooks in the mall.” A teacher tells him Walker’s novels are better, “but she didn’t understand / what I needed.” “Men. Men had not written for me. / Imagine me, then, in West Virginia / needing someone to talk to.” And then, “People have told me her poems / aren’t good. But they looked / this queer kid in the face. / Said: Refuse to be erased.” The end rhyme is an example of the elegant craftedness of these poems that seems, but cannot be, effortless.
Who else writes today with Smith’s degree of unadorned truth-telling? With such a heroic willingness to be unheroic? With a grief so bare, so undistracted by goofy enjambments and mid-line gap-toothed caesurae, that it breaks down the door into my own heart and takes up residency, like Jesus was supposed to when I got saved.
THINGS I COULD NEVER TELL MY MOTHER
is a poem I wrote
when I was younger
about stuff I’d done
that would upset her.
Now, she has cancer.
I don’t feel bad for
writing it. It helped me say
some of those things
to her face. Things
I haven’t told my
mother: Get better.
I don’t know who
I’ll be after you die.
It’s clear this poet spent a lifetime building to this collection, tearing off the Band-Aids left and right, with what O’Hara described as “overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity.” Aaron Smith is our Frank O’Hara. Give him a damned Pulitzer.
[Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press on October 1, 2019, 120 pages, $17.00 paperback]
* * * * *
Nathan McClain on Fantasia for the Man in Blue, poems by Tommye Blount
In her wonderful and instructive essay entitled “Image,” poet Ellen Bryant Voigt describes image as “produced by feeling, which modifies objects within the gaze” — meaning a reader identifies and engages with a poem’s emotive thrust through the manner by which her speakers amplify, magnify, and exaggerate that which dwells upon the mind. If the poem, like a photograph, is about invoking presence, the role of image is to reveal the limits of its individual material components and reach beyond the anecdotal, beyond the poem’s frame; the self should somehow be implicated. Of Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount’s long-awaited debut collection, poet Vievee Francis writes, “It is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait, where the self is viewed from every vantage.” Watched. And in these poems, there is always the watcher and the watched, the watcher and that which is transformed — made even to feel niggerish — by such attentive and active watching.
Tommye Blount, author of the chapbook What Are We Not For (Bull City Press, 2016), is, among other things, a poet of image. His images are exciting, unique, and often deepened or complicated through repetition both within individual poems and across the collection. Fantasia for the Man in Blue’s prologue, one of four treatments of the collection’s titular poem, teaches us not only how precisely this poet sees but also frames what is seen to further reveal his speaker. The poem opens with a rather ordinary or commonplace setting: its subject, addressed in the second-person, on an early morning walk —
You know good and well you can’t be out here
in the dark morning to take in
the moon — full as the bowl of light
attached to this police cruiser.
Blount’s deployment of image infuses “the moon” at once with freshness and concern, familiarity and dissonance; for the reader, “the bowl of light / attached to this police cruiser” seems unexpected but grants us access to the speaker’s interiority, his “feeling” mind, which performs the amplifying. The unexpectedness of the image, however, is what gives it strength, particularly when juxtaposed against the details that follow, that of a “routine” police stop, which increasingly more is expected in the America Fantasia for the Man in Blue interrogates, most especially “when it is dark like this; when I am dark like this” (from “Historical Site”). The poem’s narrative is a literal reality, but in the context of the collection, it is also amounts to a sequence of notes in the larger fantasia—the book’s title invokes music or Musical Theater—which means there are characters, blocking, movement, and lighting. There is a stage. There is an arc. You recite your lines, I’ll recite mine.
So, a self-portrait, absolutely, but I would also wager Fantasia for the Man in Blue as a book about hunger and “the dangers / of hunger.” Constant or recurring hunger. Hunger for racial justice. Hunger for love, acceptance, and allegiance. Literal and erotic hunger. How the body requires nourishment and is too offered as nourishment. Blount’s speaker(s) has a greedy eye. One instance of such greed is “My God, Lick Him Clean,” an ekphrastic poem in response to Peter Williams’ oil painting “Portrait of Christopher D. Fisher, Fourth Reich Skinhead, 1995,” also the collection’s cover art. One could easily spend the entirety of a book review discussing only this poem, as it reaches across the entirety of Blount’s collection, however I’ll try to briefly and succinctly address it. The poem is a triptych, though rather than neatly separated individual sections, the three sections are “woven back over then across / themselves like history’s ashen fibers,” stepped or indented on the page. One of the poem’s dilemmas is bearing the weight of the Williams painting, the infamous “right swipe” of online dating or hookup apps and “old story” of the resulting — in this case, interracial — sexual encounter, the Portuguese schooner, Arrogante, and the strange case of murder and cannibalism by its white captain and crew during the Transatlantic slave trade, and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, specifically the beating of Reginald Denny, simultaneously, the way history, and the poem’s speaker, must. Or the way a slave ship must carry its “swiped cargo” within its hidden depths. At large, Blount’s poems dredge these particular moments of a personal history while reaching across and intersecting with the larger scope of American history. Watching footage of Denny’s assault, for example, Blount’s speaker muses:
why didn’t he stay inside; why didn’t we stay inside;
why did he have to face us; why did we have to face him;
who did he think we were; who did we think we were;
we made him sorry; we were sorry;
he called out for help; we were calling out for help;
we were just kids; I was just a kid —
my mouth wide open, I swallowed
the Black boys, I swallowed the white boy,
I held my head down, I choked up, I was so sorry —
whose face was that; who face is this?
~
There is no difference between you and me.
~
I am in love with a white boy, he is beautiful,
so sweet. You should see him, I mean really see him:
the way his head gets framed inside the crook of my neck;
my nose pressed against his forehead.
When he holds his hand to my chest,
a salute against my heart,
is this not a pledged allegiance, a vow, love
of ritual from an old country?
America’s narrative and personal narrative. Formally, the poem attempts to untangle these histories, though without success, the cultural past too intricately threaded to the personal present. The speaker “chokes” from sexual pleasure and chokes from the pain of history. The chiasmic section of “My God, Lick Him Clean” referenced above enacts the manner by which the speaker realizes how similar we — black and white persons — are, how “there is no difference between youand me” — in desire, in our capacity to harm one another, in our guilt or culpability for the state of the world or its faulty rhetoric. But there clearly is difference, which causes these watched boys to perform a violence that also implicates Blount’s the speaker because “there was no difference; we all looked alike, / no one could tell whose face was whose.” Blount doesn’t state any of this declaratively, and doesn’t have to, his deployment of juxtaposition enacts it, the poem carefully structured to temper sentiment and sentimentality. When Blount closes the above section with “I give him my heart,” all that has previously transpired in the poem teaches us that to present this devastatingly pretty and sweet white boy with his heart, like a captive on the Arrogante, is to risk being consumed. The poem offers pleasure as salve, as a kind of absolution for a lover’s — and by proxy, a culture’s — history:
… When he tells you he’s sorry,
how could you not fall to your knees,
my God, lick him clean?
“In the portrait // of the subject, always the likeness of its maker,” Blount writes. The watcher and the watched. In the second section of the book, Blount interrogates cruising culture and aspects of the lives of several quintessential gay adult films or performers, one of whom, Erik Rhodes, had a penchant for playing
… the cop with a weakness
for the perpetrator pinned
to the ground in such a way
that it sounds as if he
cannot breathe, the throat locked
under the glazed forearm.
The perpetrator is Black
and so are you, yet you insist
on giving the shiny star another scene
in which to shoot
his wad one more time,
(from “Not an Elegy for Erik Rhodes”)
“Subject is pretext,” a former advisor used to tell me. By which he meant a poem’s apparent subject matter is only a vehicle used to approach some other subject or topic, is a metaphor created to engage some larger human experience. The poem is not an elegy for Erik Rhodes because it is an elegy for Eric Garner, who is conjured by “the perpetrator pinned / to the ground in such a way // that it sounds as if he / cannot breathe.” The tension of the poem lies in the juxtaposition of perhaps the more noble hunger for racial justice which, syntactically is positioned as subordinate to the speaker’s erotic hunger for this “white man—shaved / and muscular—.” As a Black poet, how could this conflict not produce a kind of shame? In the way watching pornography can also produce shame, a need for darkness and secrecy. Like “My God, Lick Him Clean,” the emotional heft and nuance of this poem is bound in how these competing desires are tangled, which is a human dilemma.
Early in the book, “The Man in Blue” often takes the shape of a cop, or a performer playing a cop, but there are other iterations — one of the most significant being Blount’s own father. In a latter “Fantasia for the Man in Blue,” he’s figured as “an absence of a body, / an outline // surrounded in blue,” and in “Portrait of My Father,” arrayed in “… blue corduroy / slippers, blue and white striped // boxer shorts, blue Champion / sweatpants,” the diction and details of which are largely lifted from James Blount’s autopsy report. Louise Glück opens her iconic “Love Poem” with “There is always something to be made of pain,” and Blount, in poem after poem, makes that something. He is a master craftsman, a poet’s poet. Conventional received forms, or variations thereof, appear throughout the collection, to include the ballad (“The Ballad of Bobby Blake”), several sonnets, the ghazal (“The Hunger of Luther Vandross”), and the specular (“Hardheaded Aubade”); each of these poems formally resolve, however, their larger implications resist closure, resonating long after reading. “I am a poet after all,” Blount writes in the prologue, and he proves this in image after image — each more precise and revealing, in the way a police cruiser’s light, or a stage’s light, or the spangling of a multitude of stars can reveal.
[Published by Four Way Books on March 2, 2020, 152 pages, $16.95 paperback]
* * * * *
Lee Upton on Vertigo & Ghost, poems by Fiona Benson
The British poet Fiona Benson’s second collection, Vertigo and Ghost, winner of the 2019 Forward Prize, disinters Greek mythology, eviscerating the myths to expose and confront the torture of rape — and how a woman may find no safety in the courts or in the wider culture. Unflinching, the poems transpose the myths onto scenes of contemporary violence and threats of violence against women.
Throughout the book’s first section, a multi-part poem, Benson articulates the ways in which rape seldom follows conventional narrative expectations:
Rape is rarely
what you think.
Sometimes you are
outside yourself
looking down
thinking slut
as you let him do
what he wants
on your own familiar sheets
to stop the yelling
and the backhand to the face
and the zeroing in
of the fist.
Points of view and forms shift to emphasize transformation, as Benson draws not only from mythology but from the rhetoric of screenplays, archives, forensics, and a physical maze (in a shaped poem). When Zeus speaks, his words are capitalized, suggesting his outsized ability to threaten, and yet Benson counterpoints his words with the banality of his observations and his blatant, vulgar, and casually executed cruelty:
YOU’RE LOOKING HEAVY
IN THE STOMACH LATELY
YOU COULD DO SOME EXERCISE
ALWAYS LOUNGING AROUND
WITH THESE ZINES
LOOK AT YOUR WINGS
THOUGH YOU NEVER WERE
A PRETTY GIRL I SUPPOSE
THAT WAS NEVER
YOUR THING
Although Zeus speaks at points, it is the woman who has been raped who asserts control of the narrative to make us see in clarified terms what she endures. She creates what she calls “rough music” as she seeks “to out you Zeus, / to drive you through the streets, with songs / that find a name for you at last, / you filthy pimp, you animal, you rapist.” Her own narrative challenges and subsumes his: “Go ahead, Zeus. Constellate this.”
The threat of danger runs throughout the collection. Benson renders a young woman’s fear of a man when, to avoid his attack, she must “hold [her] breath / and listen / for the electricity / crackling across his skin / to rest.” In another poem in which Zeus is a contemporary rapist, “he was swan, I was pinned.” Although eventually brought to trial, the rapist receives a light sentence because “The judge delivers / that he is an exemplary member / of the swimming squad.”
The second part of the book executes a steep turn toward the natural world, family life, and a struggle with despair: “each day is a cold stone / you must push.” Benson creates an unsentimental pastoral. A sparrow is captured by a hawk, another sparrow mistakes a window for lush greenery. She makes wonderfully close, vivid observations of a toad, bats, a blue heron. And as a human animal her speaker changes into another sort of animal in “Wildebeest,” a love song to a daughter and a vivid account of childbirth: “I became beest — / I submitted to my body’s / wild stampede.” In “Ruins” she consecrates the physical changes childbirth has wrought:
amen I say
to my own damn bulk,
my milk-stretched breasts —
amen I say to all of this
if I have you —
your screwball smile
at every dawn,
your half-pitched, milk-wild smile
at every waking call,
darling, dark-eyed girl.
The collection’s final poem extends toward imagining women in countries under siege and ends with lines evoking prayer: “always some woman is running to catch up her children / we dig them out of the rubble in parts like plaster dolls – / Mary Mother of God have mercy, mercy on us all.”
What makes this collection striking on so many fronts: how both powerful and subtle these poems are—how they work the language hard, line by line, how vividly they demonstrate that rage and horror may be bound and how little protection may be offered us, how Benson’s visceral, exact images give each of the poems a measure of life’s blood.
[Published by Jonathan Cape Poetry / Random House U.K. on March 1, 2019, 112 pages, $12.31 U.S, UK £10.00, Canada $21.99]