Lighten Up
Left the last of nearly twenty sacks of books
at the thrift store Saturday.
One must be ruthless in these things.
Who goes and who stays?
Is there time and space for Kant, or heart
for Chekov whom I can hardly bear to read?
Eventually, one tires of deciding,
leaving titles random as a bombed-out city,
a Chartres here, a McDonalds there.
All self-help gone, expired,
no shelf life, sticky residue of
sweetness in an empty pop can.
All poetry stays, understood or not.
Auden and Eliot peer down each
from ends of their respective rows.
What never will be read again,
what never will be read at all,
what seemed profound but does not now,
the lumpy sacks look pathetic,
slumped against stacks of used up
toys in the bowels of the thrift store,
and you suspect what perhaps
they always may have been-
a pastime, no more, no less,
no noble quest, no badge
of learning, just something to do,
like feeding and trimming one’s lawn
or joining a bowling league
down on the southside of town-
where the thrift store is.
______________
Keith Hansen
Review by Estill Pollock
The first critic-reviewers of Paradise Lost were not cowed or otherwise intimidated by Milton’s monumental peaks and troughs. They simply were at a loss as to what to make of it, stating that ‘it was all out of plumb—not one of the angles at the four corners was a right angle!’ In “Lighten Up,” we observe the dissemination of one’s cultural heritage, treated to similar scrutiny by the poet himself. Even he cannot seem to answer for his previous tastes in Philosophy, Drama and other worthy examples of cultural life.
A dilemma arises, in identifying what will ‘live’ as literature, as against ‘titles random as a bombed-out city’—the precious home library volumes now backroom detritus at the local thrift store:
what seemed profound but does not now,
the lumpy sacks look pathetic…
The study of the Western Canon is reduced to habit, and subject to a ruthless excision, the once-precious editions now recognized as
a pastime…
no noble quest, no badge
of learning, just something to do,
like feeding and trimming one’s lawn
The poem itself builds through the technique of cataloguing and asides, settling lastly into the poet’s personal revelation about choices and Names in the heroic sense: Kant, Chekhov, Auden and Eliot—all, given their due, with only some surviving the cull. The poet declaring,
All poetry stays, understood or not.
The poem is funny-profound as opposed to funny-strange; there is nothing here qualifying as surreal or occult in pattern or voice. Yet, we observe keenly the poet’s drift along once-righteous paths.
It remains unclear whether or not it is he who has changed, or if we are to accept that metaphysical doubt is inherent in the undercurrent of ’noble’ discourse. All, now abandoned, except…except….
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
About twenty-seven years after the first, I’m in the process of putting out a second book. If you write, sooner or later you’ll have your book; it’s unavoidable, like taxes, or like the occasional visit to jail in a game of Monopoly. Pulling teeth, cutting your nails: it has to be done. A form of seasonal pruning, a shedding. Hundreds of thousands of poetry writers around the world – do the maths: poetry books in their millions, these pocket-sized mirrors, each one a flavor, each one a shade. Poetry books: these physical outputs of strictly-non-physical motions, where writers’ and readers’ reflections overlap and diverge, are a funny odd thing indeed; they truly are the quintessential manifestation of everything and nothing. Anyway, substitution time is approaching, and James Patterson’s days of being the fourth leg of my bed are nearly over: two copies of my Outcalls should do the trick.
Review by Paul Jones
In which reading, however deeply, is finally seen as a pastime as time passed as represented by the discarding of old once loved books. It’s sad, but so is joining a bowling league not far from the thrift store where the books have landed.
I feel the pain and feel seen.