Asked to name the sine qua non of poetry, John Berryman replied, “Imagination, love, intellect — and pain. Yes, you’ve got to know pain.” Some would balk at that last item — what about the great poems of joy, of disinterest? Whether or not Daniel Lawless agrees with Berryman that suffering fuels a necessary poem as much as an intelligent and compassionate imagination, his own poetry surely knows pain as intimately as anyone’s. What might be coined Agonal Knowledge informs the strident title of his first book, The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With (2018). Although Lawless titles his second volume less brazenly, I Tell You This Now withstands the storm inside Lear’s “little world of man” with a similarly frontal insolence of style. The word “decorum” once meant more than mere etiquette; in the 16th century it defined “that which is proper or fitting in a literary or artistic composition.” Given the insanity of losses these new poems liberate and then restrain into patterned language, a style that flouts poetic manners — and flaunts a penchant for the “pretty weird and imperious,” as one poem puts it — quite properly fits its occasion.
After multiple readings, it’s clear that the book’s backstory of mental and mortal injuries is a long one. Of course, a damage report does an injustice to the most salient imaginative victory Lawless’s poems realize: these threnodies play a complex and often comical music that’s so in tune with madness and death, they seem to resonate from the insides of both. A patient’s drugged blurt from “The Kingdom of the Ill” — “Your dead father who is beautiful like Quang Duc /Setting himself aflame / You’ll announce to the night-nurse, vaporous with morphine” — owes its virtuosic bad taste to a “you” anonymous as the poem’s speaker, but the poet knows the script intimately enough to write it. I Tell You This Now weaves the hard facts that incite its poetry into the associative (and very occasionally, dissociative) textures of its poems. It’s a style of hectic velocities, sudden swerves, rash u-turns, and sometimes abrupt dead ends, all pointing toward a truth about psychological damage. As with Dickinson’s “superb surprise” of Truth that “must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind,” the poems of I Tell You This Now know how trauma requires the traumatized to edge up to, and steal away from, the brute evidence of memory.
In a different containment tactic, Lawless refracts autobiography through a post-modernist lens (albeit an atypically humane one). The title of “Boyhood” stands for a poetic genre as much as a period of life remembered, the poem instantly following up on that inference with a take-down of the retrospective lyric’s fourth wall —
And now we come to the poem of the great mystery
Of the years 1957-1963. As you can see,
It’s a short poem, with just enough room
For the apple core I broke my front tooth on …
After darkening the scenario with a cameo of “my brother waving though the iron gates of a sanitarium,” this tender spoof on the poemed-up memoir arrives at its winning punchline, deftly conflating reminiscence with poetry’s sovereignty as Prime Namer:
And I,
Whistling though a missing incisor, ringing
Somewhere in the Alpine air of the years 1957-1963
The bright silver bell of its title.
Boyhood is a world full of lost teeth, jackknives, wax lips (remember them?), nails, hoses, and Schwinns; and, yes, “Boyhood” is the title of a poem that signifies that world. Let’s not make too big a deal of it.
Titles also nod toward aesthetic distance by virtue of Lawless’s fondness for the exotic or oddball word (“Freudenschreck,” “Ullage,” “Dither”) or the plain word made strange by intense concentration (“Aster,” “Once,” “Whoopee”). Sometimes, disinterested curiosity fastens upon a weirdly named object, as when “Aglet” scans its subject’s multiple meanings — among them a tool, a claw, a vase, an eel — before settling on the most reassuringly homely: “the little sheath / at the end of a shoelace.” A deeper dive into its word-root, however—“… from the Old French, aiguille, ‘needle, / To point or pierce. Colloquially a small sorrow” — recalls the fraught ritual of a strict father’s nightly vocabulary quiz. Similarly, the fetching nine-line ode to the etymology of “Once” begins benignly enough — “Beautiful, gliding word, although perhaps less a word / than an exhalation” — but soon detects “a little wince / in there, a little ache,” as the mouth-sound brushes the ear, only to brush past: “Once, we begin, our lips puckered, as if for a kiss, / but a kiss that never comes, breathless, forever in the past.” A bit more volubly titled, “Etched Pewter Bird” relishes the metallic object of attention because it doesn’t hunger, can’t sicken, and keeps still and silent — no cheeping, no trembling or even perching. The poem extols its subject’s power to signify nothing. But when life interrupts with a dire message —
... from across the country the news arrived
Not eight hours ago yet this windless December night
That my oldest friend in this world is dead,
And there isn’t anything she or I can do about that.
— the poem sees past the consolations of nihilism and into the “stunned heart” of grief: “nameless, hollow, not hawk or sparrow.” In all of these renditions of the Rilkean Dinggedicht, inanimate matter appeals in part because the lifeless cannot die, but the psychic ballast derived from contemplating objects or digging into word-roots proves unstable. Sometimes the platforms that imagination looks out from also survey a violated mindscape.
For all their luminously quirky surfaces, some of these poems’ most piercing effects register unobtrusively, almost subliminally. “Family Photographs: My Brother, Solar Eclipse, 1965”opens the book, its title promising a look at one of our solar system’s rare alignments, a promise its first line breaks:
In a year, Haldol, ECT, the closed gates of a sanitarium.
But for now — how happy you were.
To be eleven and unconcerned
For once with school, the Cubs, who punched who.
For a few minutes to be unlearned, to be taught
A new world. O, distant boy, how marvelous
It all must have been, to be turned into a ghoul with your friends,
To spurn the murmur of grown-ups with their highballs and hair
On the deck for a lowering sky burned sepia, orange.
At three o’clock to feel yourself disappear inside yourself —
To cast no shadow. And — so long ago now
How did you put it? — the delicious, insistent thought
What if it stays like this? To yearn and yet not to know yet
What that yearning meant.
Despite the shockwave released by its opening gambit, the poem refigures its composite of snapshots with tact, employing literal images only (the ghoul and burned-sepia sky debatable exceptions). Each detail speaks matter-of-factly; and the poem’s reticent idiom, while winningly brisk — “who punched who” — turns up the volume for a single apostrophe: “O, distant boy, how marvelous / It all must have been.” It isn’t metaphor, then, but rather the workings of rhetoric that furnish emotional resonance: the first line’s disorienting flash-forward; the second’s mash-up of present and past, both enacting how trauma upsets time. The poem’s final syntactical unit — “to yearn and yet not to know yet / What that yearning meant” — captures much about Lawless’s understated methods. We respond first to the ungainly pathos of twin conjunctions repeating a mere three words apart, but closer reading discloses how the chiastic pattern in yearn/yet/yet/yearning (chiasmus being the Mobius strip of literary devices) embeds emotional immobility — “what if it stays like this?” — in the poem’s syntax.
Elsewhere, time doesn’t halt so much as function as a delaying tactic, postponing a poem’s collision with bereavement. For nearly 300 words, “Rose” — a hybrid of prose and verse? — impersonates an encyclopedia entry, beginning with exact (and, this time, richly metaphorical) descriptions of a rare beetle (“Lunaticus. Sub-order Dermaptera”) — which, on closer inspection, proves to be a “sad insect” prone to spasmodic “spells,” its strange behavior ultimately “devolv[ing] into a sort of madness.” In a parallel devolution, semantic precision and apt similitude gradually degenerate, the expert’s attention span digressing from entomological fact to Medieval Astrometry, art history, and alluring word-roots, before imploding into choked non-sequitur:
A cobwebbed old gardener’s shack like the first stirrings of a trumpet …
… ghost bike…bricked-up stained glass window …
the rose which only words far from roses can describe
wrote the great French poet Aragon.
Like beetle, like poem. Only from this rhetorical nadir can the near-speechless speaker reveal why he’s at such a loss for words — “And how else should I speak of you, dearest sister, /on this your death day?” — outing the poem as having been an elegy all along.
The recipients of elegy can also talk back, as does Lawless’s late first wife in “From the Afterlife,” which joins a sub-genre of elegy I’ll christen Consolations from the Other Side. (Rilke’s “Requiem on the Death of a Boy” and Derek Walcott’s beautiful “For Adrian” belong to this family.) Lawless’s ventriloqual performance here feels so negatively capable that the poem’s posthumous speaker comes across as less devised than overheard:
My last days were not so bad, my ex-wife says from the afterlife,
Not so bad as you think. So relax.
The Home Helpers you hired didn’t steal from me
As far as I knew, neither money or my Dilaudid —
Or have their boyfriends over as if I were blind and deaf.
I especially liked the Dominican one,
Alaia — Lord, the stories she could tell!
I read, watched a lot of television, if you can believe it,
Baseball, if you can believe it, Maddow, the food shows.
You remind me a little of Bourdain. Sexy, but no beast. Seriously …
Such beguiling confidentiality — habits of speech so persuasively not the poet’s — may at first distract readers from the first line’s sleight-of-viewpoint, whereby a dialog tag transfers the living speaker’s third-person perspective to the late beloved’s reassuring anecdotes and gentle imperatives. Slangy, terse, familiar, the benign teasing of her wit, and especially those gorgeous asides — “if you can believe it,” “not so bad,” and elsewhere in the poem, “can you imagine?” and “here’s the thing” — dispense common turns of phrase as leitmotifs, intensifying the intimacy. In short, she talks from death how she talked in life. Rarely has the osmosis between the quick and the dead been figured with such poignance. Her curtest remark — “Happy, Daniel” (an all-clear signal from the deceased? marching orders to the widower? toddler-speak to a toddler?) — could hardly pierce more deeply with fewer words.
Only briefly in I Tell You This Now does Lawless’s verbal momentum slow somewhat — in a suite of five meditations on photographs depicting patients and staff in a polio ward from the mid-1940s (with a glance at the awful machinery of treatment). The poems persuade, and their detached standpoint provides respite; but one can feel in them a restless imagination bridling against the enforced inaction of ekphrasis. Even so, on occasion the restriction generates resourceful maneuvers, as in “Anonymous Girl, Aged 17, ‘Cured,’ Awaits Her Departure from St. Anthony’s Hospital. The caption’s scare quotes quietly expose the fraud; the details insist on the girl’s bodily reality — “stiff-legged, ashen, emaciated — still, posed /against this mottled wall in her best black shoes”; and Lawless’s subtler eye scans the photograph’s borders to posit a life outside them:
… Also — a late arrival — a manicured hand
ferrying something reddish leftward into the frame — a rose,
perhaps, from the impossibly handsome doctor;
how, slightly blurred, she appears just about to turn
to thank him, and was speechless.
The enjambment deployed in “just about to turn/to thank him” catches the girl in mid-gesture, a stationing worthy of Keats; the empathic theory of mind that notes her “best black shoes” (my italics) pays homage to Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.”
In a book replete with such penetrating, necessary poems, it’s a challenge to suss out the bonafide tours de force. “Home Visit” certainly counts as one. Too long to quote in full, a sampling gives a sense of just how energetic, how fun, a Lawless guided tour through Bedlam can be:
In the kitchen, it’s chaos again. Your brother the year-ago diagnosed schizophrenic
is shouting Hey Boy! and — really — Satan! into his untouched favorite home-visit
dinner of Rice-A Roni and Kool-Aid. He’s fifteen, emaciated, still in his name-tagged whites
from Central State Hospital, with two black eyes and the fragmented story of a blonde girl
drowned by someone named Tommy in the brackish retention pond there, a story interspersed
randomly with unearthly modulations of the word gusto as in Schlitz. It’s 1966. The year before …
Unhinged hilarity enlivens this lunatic binge — wires it, really — as mania clangs so loudly it ultimately collapses into the recollected gibberish of a drunk uncle’s lullaby: “Beeum, beeum, bambalow, Bambalow and dillidillidow./My little friend I lull to rest.” All the while, the speaker presides over this crazed circus like Joel Grey’s leering, clown-pallid Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, the second-person vocative case transparently and poignantly a self-protective dodge. The future bodes even more dreadful ills: “the twitching and drooling of ropy belt-high strands of spittle/ due to early onset tardive dyskinesia” — that is, a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary movements of the face and jaw. As the poem itself acknowledges, this fun home “compounded of pride and shame, of pity and horror” promises no fun. But who wouldn’t keep reading?
“All of this and more, of course,” says the carnival barker of “Home Visit.” That’s how I feel about reviewing this book I so admire. I’d planned to write about its most haunting and haunted Dinggedicht, titled “Daniel”; as well as how“Revelation on Pearson Avenue” honors happenstance by giving a shapely pace to random events observed in a Chinese restaurant. I wanted to rewatch “Poem Against the Rich” begin in disdain and end in eulogy, the wealthy classes placed among the meek members of the resurrection; and to praise “The Arts of Love” — its carnal knowledge both tender and kinky, with an irresistible fetish for farm implements. An early note for this review asked, how does a characteristic Lawless poem behave? The question begs the question because any good poet’s poems behave and misbehave differently. Characteristically sui generis, a favorite of mine from I Tell You This Now behaves like this:
ON THE WAY TO YOUR FUNERAL, SLEEP-DEPRIVED
On the slow overnight train from Chicago to Altoona,
After people had settled down, having hoisted their heavy bags
Onto the overhead rack and unfurled a magazine
Or unwrapped a tired muffin or iffy chicken salad sandwich,
I heard somewhere a few rows up a kid swear, No,
It was a real-live corpse! Pretty funny, but
An image that stayed with me all the way to Toledo
As I gazed at my haggard face through the window
In the growing dark, where cows and trees and STOP signs
And here and there an unmoored trailer floated
By as if a dim river had overrun its banks,
As if I were already thinking of them in the afterlife;
Or in a more Zen or theoretical physicist sense
As if, when I let my brow fall against the cold glass,
My own face disappearing, the cows and trees
And STOP signs and occasional double-wide had become
My thoughts alone, disembodied, drifting out
From the Ohio countryside into the vast, unknowable universe.
An image that, inevitably, vanished,
As despite the grinding of the heavy wheels and the screeching
Of the air brakes, I took a little nap, then got up to massage
My aching thighs and use the bathroom.
Which is pretty much where I’d like to leave you, Robert.
Opening the thin little door with a majestic yawn to find
Everyone silently gathering their things
In the half-lit car, the kids rubbing their eyes,
As you wipe your hands on a crisp white handkerchief.
As the porter with his gleaming silver cart comes rattling down the aisle
With his fresh Times for sale and his steaming croissants,
The tiny bubbles of Perrier rising in their tinkling green bottles
As the voice on the loudspeaker announces Altoona!
Next Stop, Altoona! as if it were heaven itself, your hometown.
Let’s let this weary but intensely afferent poem — a “tired muffin” and “iffy chicken salad” fulfilling its appeal to all five senses, its conductor announcing an infinitely deferred homecoming — speak out loud and bold for itself.
[Published by Červená Barva Press on February 7, 2024, 55 pages, $18.00 US paperback]