In one of Jack Gilbert’s earliest poems, he imagines the Italian painter Paolo Uccello ruminating on the notions of perspective that marked both his work and his theory. The poem opens: “‘Perspective,’ he would mutter, going to bed. / ‘Oh che dolce cosa e questa / prospettiva.’” What a sweet thing perspective is. In the stanzas that follow, Gilbert defines the concept himself:
… Perspective. A place
to stand. To receive. A place to go
into from. The earth by language.
These lines bring to mind Archimedes’ famous quotation: “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.” But what, in the context of poetry, might it mean to “move the whole world”? If perspective is, as Gilbert assures us, an Archimedean “place / to stand,” then from which perspective might we gain “the earth by language”?
These questions rang in my head as I read The Complaints, the most recent collection of poems by W.S. Di Piero. Like Gilbert, Di Piero is more interested in finding “a place / to stand”— a perspective from which he might understand the strange and, at times, disheartening vicissitudes that mark his own life — than he is in offering clean, easy-to-paraphrase parables about what’s wrong (or right) about the world that surrounds him.
“I don’t want wisdom,” he announces in the book’s first line. This candor — in which the speaker sets himself up as a kind of anti-Solomon — comes as both surprise and refreshment, especially given the fact that The Complaints is Di Piero’s twelfth book of poetry.
So what does he want? He answers:
I want the silver safety pin so bright
in that girl’s lip, and seasonal silver
to foil the air like silver-leaf oaks
in their flush finalities. No ratiocination.
Here, magpie-like, Di Piero collects the different flashes of “silver” that dart around his field of vision and arranges them, like links in a braided chain, three times in the first three quoted lines. These bits of brightness — what he calls later in the poem “recycling-bin realities” — are what he’s after in The Complaints.
But what is it about “wisdom” (or, for that matter, “ratiocination”) that Di Piero finds so off-putting? He confronts this question directly in “Egypt at Pep’s,” a poem in which the speaker considers a street he knew as a child. After cataloguing different concrete descriptions of the street, Di Piero ends the poem:
Abstraction has
its sheer beauty
but diminishes us,
while a ripe banjoist
somewhere down
some other street
sings “Roxanne.”
These lines serve as a thesis of sorts for The Complaints. But they set up, too, a double bind for the poet. For how can one write about abstraction — even to denigrate it — without falling into abstraction oneself?
The answer lies in a closer look at the syntax of this single sentence. While the first three lines do admit the abstraction they rail against, the last four solve the double bind by returning to the grounded, physical world. These final lines employ a paratactic logic disguised — through the temporally-deceptive “while” — as hypotaxis; that is, though the “while” suggests continuity, a rupture has occurred — just below the surface, at the level of thought itself — between the opening abstraction and the final concrete image. This rupture stands as a negative proof for Di Piero’s claim. Certainly, the poem tells us, there is beauty in “abstraction” — in “wisdom” and “ratiocination” —but our lives would be thin, meaningless, and diminishedwithout those moments of tangible experience — those faint echoes of “Roxanne” — that mark our days.
This claim — that experience sustains us at a deeper level than abstraction ever can — provides an emotional foundation for many of the poems in The Complaints. “I tell myself to make words be the pith and bark / that experience is, not abstracted from it,” he writes in a poem entitled “Before the Reading.” This meta-literary confession suggests something important about Di Piero’s tendencies. While most of the poems begin in concrete, unadorned detail, many of the best ones can’t resist — or, rather, don’t truly want to — leaving simple description behind .
This departure comes, more often than not, in the form of a simple question, often directed at an absent “you.” As in the poem “Catch You at the Oregon,” which ends:
Where are you now? You with your buggy shades
who never rode an historic trolley car till now
I say it’s so. I’m still here across from you.
Weird grainy steam hangs in the air of things.
This tender question — “Where are you now?” — echoes the ending of an earlier poem, in which the speaker says, “I’ve felt this way before, at home in time but lost. / Where are you now that you’re near me again?”
Taken together, these questions offer a portrait of a speaker who feels, in acute moments, a deep, inexplicable despair that leaves him adrift in time, lost in memory — or, to borrow from Walker Percy, “lost in the cosmos.” In yet another poem, Di Piero confronts this same feeling of lost bewilderment with a similar question. “The come and go of local life fills me / with sadness,” he admits. “Time hurts. Where am I?”
If the excerpted lines from “Egypt at Pep’s” offered a thesis for the book’s poetic project, then these two sentences — “Time hurts. Where am I?” — might serve, too, as metonymic for the book’s emotional project. Throughout The Complaints, W.S. Di Piero recreates small, seemingly-innocuous moments from his past. These memories affirm the beauty not just of the natural world but also the world of factories, streets, and rusting cars — what he calls in one poem “this dissonant rhyming world we keep falling into.” But the poems also affirm the loneliness of, well, being alone in such a world. After recounting a memory in one section of the eponymous sequence, he writes:
Did I tell you that? What else to say?
We animals long to be together in
an instant of out-of-time time while in
this quickened riddled here and now.
The ceiling fans will cool us down.
The vulnerability of the first and final lines of this passage render the abstraction of the middle three lines almost unnecessary. “Did I tell you that? What else to say?” the speaker asks, and the questions — which go, of course, unanswered — echo with a tenderness that returns in the final line’s quiet iambic plea.
These questions — “Where are you?”; “Did I tell you that?”; “Where am I?” — characterize what makes The Complaints such a particularly affective collection of poems. Certainly, W.S. Di Piero wants to interrogate the relationship between perspective and its representation, between abstraction and concrete description. But, above all else, his poems are marked by a gentle, almost-childlike need to be reassured that, amidst the flux and confusion of being in time, someone — some absent “you” — is listening.
[Published on February 2, 2019 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, 72 pages, $15.95 paperback]