John Skoyles’ new poetry collection, Yes and No, unfolds a personal conversation he engages in with himself and absent others that is elliptical but also conclusive, cathectic but also disinterested. In poem after poem, Skoyles faces profound loss with spare lyrical memories, lamentations, insights, and apostrophes that descend in short, lyrical lines, expounding as they concatenate from one personal rumination to another on the double-edged reality of a proverb he embeds in his poem “Lifespan of the Average Man” near the end of the book: “Time will tell. / Time will also kill / those who call life // a living. / Life doesn’t call itself that, / life waits for you // to name it / and regret claims it / if you stall.” Skoyles does indeed name “it,” his life by conjuring the absence of dear others — parents, a partner, uncles, friends — absences that become intimately present in his poems as haunting memories that avoid bathos and mere nostalgia by virtue of the vivid imagery, taut narratives, distilled pathos, risible anecdotes, and hard-won sagacity that they contain so economically.
By creating what the poet Philip Larkin called “unique distance from isolation” in his poem “Talking In Bed,” Skoyles chronicles his losses with a cold, acquisitive eye that translates the personal into the universal and minutiae into fissile symbols, as in these sober lines:
no more calling, seeking,
saluting cheering
the burning vista visible
from the dock, the deck,
the flying bridge,
there’s just a struck clock,
a stained ring around
the inside of the empty
coffee cup that last touched your lips.
Aware that no one really wants to hear another lachrymose love story, Skoyles exercises an aesthetic savvy in Yes and No that converts personal facts about family, friends, and a former beloved into sentiments and details that cross over to the reader with an appeal that transports otherwise mundane, potentially sentimental minutiae into what Czeslaw Milosz called “immense particulars,” that is, paradoxical images that take on “immense” significance as “intellectual and emotional complexes in an instant of time” (Ezra Pound), as in this graceful lyric about a couple at a prospective grave plot:
Calvary Cemetery
I’m here with my mother
rubbing moss off a stone:
the dates are clear,
the parentheses closed,
three notes from a warbler
high in the pines
compete with a couple
sparring over grooming a plot.
One shakes a trowel
At the other’s
festooned pot of mums.
above the avenue
the neon letters tv
flash in the Stevens
appliance sign
alongside Bulova Watch
and Might-T-Fine.
All around us
the dead hope to rise
and the living bring
their grief to light.
Skoyles writes seemingly effortlessly in these poems, catching himself musing and concluding, then musing some more, witnessing to the bittersweet of his life in short spare lines that descend his pages with fierce velocity. “Will a book on this shelf/ tell their stories?” he asks rhetorically at the conclusion of his poem “Love and Death,” which appears as the second poem in his book. His equivocal answer echoes repeatedly in the poems that follow with a classical resonance that betrays a rare, hard-won dearth of irritable reaching in the midst of grief and lament.
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Ridicule works as a trope in racist America, especially in an oracular black voice as deft and truthful as that of Saeed Jones. Employing both philippics and elegies that complement each other with equal doses of rage and lamentation, Jones testifies to the social plagues of racism and homophobia in America. (The book is dedicated to the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting.) In language that sizzles with irony, invective, pathos and grief, he challenges his readers, especially his white readers, to grasp his allusions, conceits, and witness to racist and homophobic atrocity. In one brilliant poem after another, Jones mixes straightforward truth-telling with impassioned catalogs, as in his razor-sharp diatribe, “It’s 1975 and Paul Mooney Says ‘Nigger’ a Hundred Times,” which reprises the comedian Paul Mooney’s excessive use of the n-word in his standup acts. By coopting the n-word in the poem with mimetic irony, Jones exhibits a la Mooney just how the act of repeating the word impugns its racist agency:
— every morning it keeps his teeth white
As a picket fence wrapped around a burned down plantations,
white as a suburb three suburbs over, white as a family tree
with niggers falling out of it, white as rabbits
grabbing their purses and running punch lines, white
as Chevy Chase looking at his dick in a funhouse mirror …
white as the kind of test questions you answer
so white college boys with white little dicks can look at you
and whine, “you’re only here because you’re Black.”
Both anger and grief charge Jones with a voice that “yawps” from the rooftops of Black America; that exists on both the page and in the air. Jones “speaks” with an eschatological audacity, presaging more of a human eschaton than an atomic or proverbially religious one — an “end” that defines eschaton as “an end” that’s loud and “leaks music like radiation.” One hears unapologetic echoes of Dick Gregory, Malcom X, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Richard Pryor, and Spike Lee, among others, throughout Alive At The End Of The World.
With a psychic sensitivity that is as acute as an ant’s acumen for detecting earthquakes, Jones announces “the end of the world,” at least in America where mass murder after mass murder occur in places like The Pulse Night Club where people merely wanted “to yell the truth about themselves to anyone // who’d listen.”
Some of the poems sound foreboding notes, as in “Extinction” where the speaker describes his own fragile mortality: “Prey me long forgotten / before one of us swallows // the last bit of the last / good tomato in America.” In “Little Richard Listens To Pat Boone Sing ‘Tuttie Fruitti,'” Jones asks Pat Boone, “Ain’t that what you really want? A stadium full / of white people screaming your stage name // and a smashed guitar where your dick used to be. / Ain’t that what you deserve? God is the only reason I haven’t spat that hook // into your mouth like a poison that will kill us both.” Only Jones’ acknowledgment of God checks his anger, but not without the implication of both his and his covetous white oppressors’ mutual destruction in God’s absence. Jones comments in a note at the end of the book that “Pat Boone watered down and added bleach to ‘Tuttie Fruittii’ and it was a bigger hit than Little Richard’s original version … In America, one way to suffer a death before you die is for people to applaud you even as they steal from you. ”
The emotional dialectic in this book swings widely in opposite directions between rage and remorse, tenderness and alienation. In his poem “Sorry as in pathetic,” Jones recounts a personal incident that illustrates the atavistic fear that prevents a woman and himself from meeting in a moment of need and the remorse that follows when his simple request is met with flight:
once I was lost on a late night street
and when I asked
the woman just ahead of me for help, she screamed
“Oh, god!” and clutched her purse the way the night holds me.
I told her I was sorry, then felt sorry for saying sorry.
I think of that woman often. I doubt she ever thinks of me.
Just as eloquent and enraged as Jones’ witness is to racism and homophobia, his jeremiads are equally impassioned and forceful. There are four numbered poems in the book with “grief” in their titles that convey unabashed love and pathos, as in these lines for his mother:“Simple grief, innocent grief, grief unfamiliar with who I was before I started grieving and I would become after the sun set on the last few minutes as your son.” All of his grief poems are anaphoric, appearing in lists that build details of his feelings of loss, as in these three opening stanzas of “The dead dozens”:
Your grief is so heavv,
when we lowered the coffin
all the pallbearers fell in too.
Your grief is so heavy,
when you cried your last good bye, the end
of the world said “nigga, get off me.”
You love your mama so much,
Freud came back from the dead
just to study your sorry ass.
Alive At The End Of The World is replete with poems that respect its readers’ intelligence, while deepening their humanity. It speaks in language that rises off the page with oral authenticity — as well as sits firmly on the page as wise rage and heartbreaking grief. It echoes with voice that stays new. It sings songs that you want to remember the words to. It haunts and preaches simultaneously with secular human homilies. Every racist should read this book out loud until he or she has memorized it.
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David Blair’s new book of poetry, True Figures, Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Pieces, consists of poems plucked from his five previous books, along with several new poems. Although the pieces in this collection date back to 2007, they betray very little if any change in Blair’s compositional strategy, which relies on leaping from one bizarre or disparate image and/or idea to another. Such gestures make for scintillating reading, as in these lines: “The ground beef empanadas, are, first of all, saintly in a baroque church niche carving sort of way downstairs at the bodega, golden diapers.” While such disparate images amuse and surprise, they tend to escape one’s memory once they’ve been read. One hears John Ashbery and James Tate, along with such French surrealists as Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Robert Desnos.
While the critic Stephanie Burt refers in her blurb to Blair’s poems as “internally aware” in their “free verse,” one with any need for discerning meaning — the kind that might lead to “internal awareness,” would be hard-pressed in their search for enough verbal coherence in Blair’s poems to find such “awareness” or “memorable speech.” Which isn’t to say Blair’s poems aren’t entertaining or imbued with sprezzatura. They are. He has learned how to let his erudite mind go, and it zooms.
One can turn to any page in True Figures and find a poem with risible language, replete with wild leaping that springs from what Hart Crane called “illogical impingements.” How not to admire a muse who inspires allusion, erudition, and disjointed leaps as imaginative as those that populate True Figures? I choose these lines arbitrarily from the opening of “For Dion In Belmont” to illustrate just how rampant Blair’s surreal inspirations are:
The Napoleans got theatrical.
The bakery surrounded me with cakes
year after year when I got along
with an invisible transistor.
Lines such as these, which abound in True Figures, testify to the mad-like yet alluring leaping that characterizes his poems. Such writing has been dubbed “automatic writing,” and perhaps it is, for it does seem beguilingly facile once the poet turns his oneiric radio on and finds his station, as Blair has done consistently throughout his career.
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Yes and No by John Skoyles, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press on November 21, 2022, 104 pages, $16.95 paperback.
Alive at the End of the World by Saeed Jones, published by Coffee House Press on September 13, 2022, 104 pages, $16.95 paperback.
True Figures by David Blair, published by Mad Hat Press on June 2, 2022, 116 pages, $21.95 paperback